Main principles of Web 2.0 design during website development

People talk about WEB 2.0 much and often. Today it is the offer "website development in WEB 2.0 style" that dominates. We will try to explain what it assumes.

What is WEB 2.0?

Really more of a marketing term than a technical one, "Web 2.0" refers to applications that allow direct interaction between a website visitor and the site.  This is a departure from "traditional" web sites that simply allowed visitors to read static content and not post questions or interact with the site in any way. 

Tim O'Reilly introduced this term in his article "Tim O'Reilly - What Is Web 2.0" from September 30th, 2005 where he connected the appearance of a great number of sites united by several common principles with the general tendency of Internet community development. He called this phenomenon WEB 2.0 versus "old" WEB 1.0.

How does WEB 2.0 look?

Rounded corners, gradient colors, legible fonts, icons, reflection effect in the images, page layout with one or two columns are external generally accepted manifestations of WEB 2.0. But does WEB 2.0 have to do with web design only? Actually, it does not. WEB 2.0 is first of all convenience for the user. It means that the site in WEB 2.0 concept has to do everything possible to be convenient, useful and interesting for the visitor.

WEB 2.0 principles

Web services. Access to web services is granted with the help of a common Internet browser. Users do not have to install any additional programs on their computers or worry about regular updates. Performance of any calculations does not demand any resource overhead from the computer because it is the server that performs all operations.

Mash-up is the opportunity to create a new web service by means of integrating program facilities of several over web services.

Ajax is the method of using JavaScript and XML technologies which permits to download necessary data in response to user's actions without refreshing the whole webpage. Thanks to the use of this approach it is possible to make user's work with the site considerably faster.

RSS is an XML-based technology which permits users to read the news from a lot of sites as a single stream (RSS feed) with the help of a special program - an RSS-aggregator. Thanks to this technology users do not have to look through tens of sites to learn about the latest news anymore. Having subscribed to RSS any user can read new publications of several sites in one place using his browser (for example, Opera or Mozilla Firefox).

Wiki sites (the brightest example is Wikipedia) permit their users to edit, add or delete information on the site or create new pages themselves. Therefore users participate in filling the sites with necessary information more actively.

Socialization. Keeping personal web diaries (blogs) is a significant example of socialization in WEB 2.0. With the help of a blog each user can somehow stand out in a crowd, personalize his definite zone of the site - add personal audio and video files, images, publish his articles or share news. Besides active creation of communities facilitates socialization. In these communities each user can leave his message, share a problem, get a lot of various opinions and express his own opinion on a certain occasion.

These principles are only a tiny part of WEB 2.0 philosophy. People dispute acrimoniously about the very concept of WEB 2.0. Someone considers it totally fictitious, only an additional marketing trick and someone says that it is a real revolution. But there is one indisputable fact: WEB 2.0 is an attempt to make Internet more convenient and useful for the user and give him a green light.

You can order a site in WEB 2.0 style right now. Just fill in the form and our managers will contact you!

TAGS
web 20, web 20 design, website development, web 2 0, ajax, wiki