Abhishek Reddy — Thu, 13 May 2004 10:26:43 +0000

Definitely quick and clean.

There are a number of people who, now over several generations (in internet years), grew weary of the focus on rich media and absolute control of style and moved to simply presenting valuable content, stressing accessibility and usability. In other words, the web site turned from being a corporate toy in 1995 to a recognised communications channel for wider society, as it is now. Thus the goals of the web site shifted from being merely superficially impressive to delivering real content to the widest possible audience. The result is XHTML, CSS, and all the rest.

The Webmistress — Thu, 13 May 2004 09:47:34 +0000

Clean & quick, but individually designed to be unique to the individual business. Flash & multimedia still have their place for certain things but for general business sites/stores I don't think flash/animation adds anything but time to download.

kaat — Thu, 13 May 2004 01:53:11 +0000

Myself, I'm passionate about sites having some personal uniqueness to them - for business too. But templates certainly have their place. I was recently helping a collegue who does sites for realtors. Those oh-so-familiar templates are boring as hell, but for people buying and selling homes, they are no doubt comforting, since they're not visiting to be impressed by visuals. And apparently, all these realtors, for one group, wouldn't have it any other way.

TonyMontana — Wed, 12 May 2004 18:41:34 +0000

>>Templates

I think standardization is good, just like how there are common components for software GUI's. Web design has been too self indulgent, the content is what I want to see.

Megan — Wed, 12 May 2004 14:01:29 +0000

I tend to agree with your friend a little bit. It's hard to use a site that has links to everything and anything on the same page. Most newspaper sites fall into this category. I don't see them changing anything so I don't know if this qualifies as a trend. Same with a lot of the big shopping sites out there. Google is the main exception.

I do see a few different trends developing:

CSS layouts - exemplified by zeldman.com. I don't know what it is about CSS layouts but they all seem to have a similar look to them. These tend to be cleaner than the aforementioned newspaper sites. So among hard core designers the trend is moving to clean and quick and has been for sometime. Will the mainstream follow this lead? That's yet to be seen.

Templates - it's starting to become obvious. Purchased templates seem to be all the rage now and it's getting really easy to identify them. I also find it extremely boring when layouts don't match the uniqueness of the site. Templates may look nice but they are so generic and boring! I think unique designs do work better but the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction.