Current trends

Current trends in the webmaster world.

The rise of CSS-designed sites - The push from designers to create websites using CSS instead of HTML tables is reaching it's tipping point. You can see many of the newer popular sites. I used to think that the technique of using the quick and easy tables wouldn't go away for a long time but I think we have reached the point at which all webmasters should make plans to change over their sites to a CSS design.

The use of alternative browsers - Just like CSS-designs, alternative browsers were making slow but steady progress but now their market share, which is in the 15-20% area, has reached the point at which all webmasters should take it into consideration by making sure their sites are working correctly in all browsers.

The popularity of Wiki pages - Wiki sites are growing rapidly. This is driven by 3 trends I believe. First, when many web forums grew to be very popular, webmasters realized that community-created content was in high demand. Two, webmasters realized that having users create the content is the best way to leverage resources. And three, the rise of Wikipedia.

Greater SEO competition - For years SEO was the web's best kept secret -and to a certain extent it still is. But when people start realizing that SEO traffic is one of the best bargain's in the history of business they will begin to grow their content to take advantage of it.

The use RSS Feeds - Use of RSS feeds have grown like crazy over the last 2 years because it is the first very simple way to syndicate content. It has been driven by webmasters creating "outbound" RSS and wanting to braodcast their content to wider audiences as well as "inbound" RSS by webmasters who don't have the resources to create dynamic content themselves.

Blog Networks - Blogs have always had that connotation of being a personal diary but because blogs contain all dynamic content, web users are now able to effectively turn them into a newspaper-like medium where people tune in regularly to read them. And now some webmasters are creating media companies to create different blogs about different topics and cross-promote them to take advantage of synergy to run them collectively as a media company. For years the web has been trying to create a model where web-based media sites would publish fresh content and articles and thrive as the internet version of a magazine. In the early days of the web there were talk about "e-zines" but the concept never took off and there are no must-read, mass-market e-zines. Salon.com and Slate.com came the closest but their failure to create must-read status always kept them one step away from achieving that breakthrough. Blog media companies seem to have the potential to create the web magazine outlet. One of the most popular blogging media companies is Gawker Media. As of February 2006, it is the parent company for 15 different weblogs, including Gawker.com, Fleshbot and Wonkette.

Rise of video-sharing sites - With bandwidth and hosting getting incredibly cheap, and multmedia finally graduating from its novelty status into being a fundamental integrated component of the web, video sharing sites are surging. For the past year or two the trend had been growing because of the humor-based sites out there like ebaumsworld.com had video-sharing pages on their sites. But now we are seeing sites solely devoted to video-sharing and are witnessesing the rise of the first well-branded video-sharing site - YouTube.com.

Better-designed sites - This may seem like an obvious and stupid entry but it seemed to me that many sites just didn't care about how they looked or functionaed until lately. I think people are starting to realize branding counts for alot and on the web your branding is the look and feel of your site. Along with the rise of CSS and the more focused use of Flash, the trend is moving towards better-designed, asthetically-pleasing, sites with higher usability.


 
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