Bo Z.

As I know, the web design started from what we called the HTML coding, which allows us to design website with rich contents, such as images, videos and hyperlinks. With the advent of high speed Internet and advanced technology, web site design became a common thing for general Internet and computer users. The one obvious phenomenon was that bloggers started modifying their blog by either using HTML, XHTML coding or some other third-party easy-to-use software. Adobe’s Dreamweaver is widely used due to its visual design concept, which allows us to design website visually instead of writing codes. But not everyone is a artist when designing website, or we simply don’t have enough time to spend on learning how to design.

Moreover, website is one of the most important things for companies that whether they do ecomerce or not, because a website is more likely to be a face of a company, and it presents viewers a big picture of what this company does and what image it creates. For my point of view, I like website that is simple, creative, and with less words on it, because I feel relaxed while I am browsing this kind of site, and I tend to spend more time on it even though there’s not much things to read. This brings us a question: What is a good web design?

When I was surfing Internet few days ago, one company really got my attention, the “nclub” web design agency, and I started looking for the information about this company besides its official site. During a interview, the Co-Founder and Senior Consultant of nclub, Martin Ringlein,  described that the web design should bring information architecture,  accessibility, usability, user-experience design and development together to truly define nowadays web design. nclub’s work also brings marketing integration into its design, which means it extended its service from a traditional web design service to a new level. As Martin said that they helps small communities to promote events. But nclub doesn’t do this to advertise itself; instead, it sponsors to help and appreciated if it got noticed.

Me and my friends was once trying to start a small online business by selling jewels on Vancouver Island. When it came to the web design, we got frustrated due to the lack of knowledge and online marketing experience. There are too many things to consider, from the initial goal, ideas, and planning to the actual web design process or hiring a company to help us. And finally we gave up, it’s just too costly to do so. Moreover, there are too many wed design companies out there on the web, and we have no idea which one o pick, because they all seemed so professional about what they do to live. This made me think a lot, such as what would the future of web design would look like few years from now.

Content Management Systemhelps both web developers and their clients to get updates, and this enables both of them to communicate easily when problems arise or new technology is being introduced, so web designers can help their clients to update their website or fix issues premotely. A “old news” predicted CMS would be used by many companies.

Finally, Web 3.0 is coming too, and it would bring us more exciting improvement, and it would make our online experience more relax and bring us more freedom. Web 3.0 Features

More and more companies have changed or adopted the online marketing model in order to attract more customers, and some of them are also trying to shift their entire business to operate fully online. As a result, the online shopping, services and other types of goods and services are being used every day. This major change in marketing has also created some concerns or problems when customers engage in many kinds of online activities, such as privacy, software pirating and other common issues.

Downloading is the most discussed issue in the past few years, and the concern is still not solved. Since the “peer-to-peer” technology has been used in many downloading software and websites, internet users can easily download many types of files off the internet, such as music, movies and video games without purchasing them. That is, customers only pay for the monthly fee to internet service providers, and then they can start downloading things insanely. On the other hand, music industry suffers the most, because the traditional CDs are no longer popular after MP3 music players have been putted in the market. And, even though customers still buy CDs from local music retailers, the physical CD records themselves are no longer attractive enough to motivate the purchase. That’s why more and more CDs are now including some sort of bonus “add-on”, such as an extra DVD or gift to push sales. 

But nothing can prevent the sales drop of CDs. According to REUTERS UK, US sales of digital music albums grew by 60% in first six months in 2007, and the sales of traditional CDs dropped 19.3% that equal to 205.7 million units. I believe that the online music “sharing” caused this, and it would still harm the CD market in the future. EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organization that helps to protect Digital Rights.  DRM, Digital Rights Management becomes the saver of the traditional music market. DRM technology locks our digital media from being pirated, converted or copied to computers, and this means we can’t make back up of our music CDs or DVDs, but it didn’t work good enough. DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act is backing up DRM in US, so that if people unlock or hack digital media which are being protected by DRM, they would receive a lawsuit. But similar law did not take effect in Canada, because we are paying extras when we purchase blank CDs or DVDs, which “grant” us the rights to “sharing digital files online.

Many people are afraid of shopping online due to the concern of security. In most cases, we have to provide our personal information when shopping online, such as Credit Card number, phone number and address to the website. Although companies that provide security feature to protect customers, many online criminals are still trying to steal our information in some ways. Therefore, companies like VERISIGN and HackResistant provide a seal to requested sites in order to prove to customers that the site they are shopping is safe and their personal information will be kept safely during or after shopping.

New technology and policy will help both marketers and customers to have a safe environment to shop online in the future. We should also be knowledgeable to deal with online crime and try to protect ourselves from privacy theft.