This is quite a popular buzzword nowadays - web 2.0. Some people have migrated to web 3.0 as well. So, what is this all about? Where do I download the new version? Many people have heard the term, many follow its directions, but very few really know what it is (and what directions they are really following).

It seems the term “Web 2.0″ was first used as a name for a conference, held by O’Reilly in 2005. The basic idea was, that the internet was/is becoming a social network, rather than just a collection of information. We were no longer just readers, but started contributing to the experience. This was the rise of blogs, wikipedia and flickr, to name just a few. More on this at O’Reilly - What is Web 2.0

Just 5, maybe 10 years ago, how many people you know, were using the internet actively? A few.. and they were probably referred to as “geeks” or such. But was internet not a social network back then? We had bulletin boards (or forums, if you prefer), we had ICQ, we had irc (or was it mIRC? ;) ). So why wasn’t it popular back then? Besides dial-up being slow and expensive, I believe all of these were too complicated for the common people. They were afraid of them.

So what is popular nowadays? Blogs… Starting your blog at blogger or wordpress is just a few clicks away. Commenting on them just requires your name and maybe an e-mail. Compare this to endless signup forms of forums and you’ll see why this is big.

And then there are social networking tools, such as myspace or facebook. It’s now as easy as ever to put yourself online and show yourself to all of your friends. But the technology existed years ago. Does anyone remember The Geocities page builder, back in 2000? It was a nice attempt, but still too complicated for the majority.

I skimmed trough Web 2.0 how-to design guide today. Let me sum it up for you - Just follow this little step:

1. Make it simple

And this is what web 2.0 really is. The end of endless forms, dull hierarchical navigations and cluttered pages. And by accomplishing this, “other people” can navigate the web without feeling lost. Plus, they’ve started contributing. Communicating. Everyone can upload his or her photos to flickr. But would they have done it if they had to connect to ftp.flickr.com on port 19752, using passive mode transfers and upload their photos to ~/www/photos/gallery ?

So, what do we, web developers learn from this? If you want people to use your pages, make them simple. Forget the nonsense, cut to the point.

And what about the web 2.0 design principles? Glass surfaces, reflections, shiny buttons? I’m sick of them. Sure, I do such designs - but people seem to expect that from me. And people seem to enjoy clicking them. So if you’ve read this far just to learn how to make a shiny website design, I feel sorry for you. I really do.

I can barely call this a redesign, hence, just an update.

Two things were bugging me with my old blog/portfolio design:

• No integration between the blog and portfolio
• No sidebar on the blog

So I decided to fix this. With my lack of time I went for just a little refreshment, not a whole new thing like I used to do every year or so. I really wanted to use nice typography in the design so I downloaded the anivers font by Jos Buivenga. I love it. This means though, that my title fonts are all images. It’s bad for accessibility, but I did my best to do it properly. So all image fonts are big enough to read comfortably and all the images have proper alt texts.

Some other enhancements are:

• Photography is now in the portfolio
• Blog also includes two most recent flickr photos
• I’m now using tags properly in Wordpress. This means I can have tag clouds. Yay! :)
• Blogroll.

I hope you like the design. Comments (positive as well as negative) are welcome.

Photography lessons started for me in the faculty a month ago. Finally, a decent subject. Although we haven’t learnt much yet, I’m quite into this. I take my camera everywhere, so basically a good shot should happen every now and then. I’ve made a little collection of some nice shots. Clicky:
dusan.smolnikar’s photos @ flickr

I’m experimenting with black&white photography quite a lot. I like the effect it makes. Also Just a tad of brown/sepia tone usually turns out to look nice.

I hope you like the photos. Feel free to comment on any deficiencies or flaws. I’m always happy to learn.