modern website design

To illustrate some of the ways in which website design has evolved, I made the newsreader shown below. Headlines from The Nation in Bangkok are shown by default; to read news from the BBC or CNN, just click the icon.

It might look a bit simple, but actually it isn't. It relies on HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, PHP & XML. Without a thorough knowledge of each of these technologies, the application would fail.

The point I am trying to make, of course, is that website design is no longer simply about Photoshop and table-based HTML. It is about blending a wide range of design and programming techniques to create the kind of complex interfaces that users not only want, but also now take for granted.

Another way in which things have evolved concerns SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. While SEO has always been an integral part of site development, many people are now stressing the importance of Social Marketing. The idea is simple: social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are amongst the most popular on the net, so opportunities abound for companies to target these communities instead of focussing purely on traditional SEO. The ROI (if things are done properly) can be be enormous.

Finally, a new and currently hot topic is typography. I'll try to write more about this in the future, but I will quickly mention that there are now several technologies that are quite literally about to change forever the way web-based fonts are managed and displayed.