12 ways to turn your Web 1.0 site into a Web 2.0 site

I like the last one... ^

nice post..

thanks !

Wow.. It was a joke people.

Stop being as stupid as you claim this article to be.

all this stuff is rubbish!

What a load of crap

Well you got raked over hot coals with this post, didn't you? Welcome to the Digg crowd: rude, anonymous, and know-it-all, yet most of them are just 17. Think what obnoxious boars they'll be in their 20's (*shiver*). I think most of them have rabies.

That said, I do have a wee critique or two, but all well-intended...first of all, nobody gives a damn about web 2.0. It's the name of a technological revolution on the Web that allows the use of Flash, Ajax, and other apps that speed up and perhaps enrich content. Changing the way your website or blog looks without employing at least one of those technologies will not make it more Web 2.0.

Second of all, black websites are old. There is only one site where I can take light text on a black background, and that's maddox.xmission.com, and that's only because I laugh so hard I'm usually in tears by the time I'm done with his posts. Content rules, but if you're not Maddox, you should get rid of the black background, which is dated and makes legibility an issue.

Tags/clouds/categories, again, who cares? Why wouldn't I want to browse the categories on someone else's website? I've been using a tags cloud myself for the last few months, but I know people have a tendency to skim over them, because they're overdone and most people don't read more than 2-3 pages into your site anyway, so I put up alternate links to the Tags page all over the place just to increase usage of them. The only good thing about tags is specificity, but specificity is often overwhelming, so I don't think categories are such a bad choice, either.

One thing I'm with you on is text size. I like text big and clear. I'm using 11 point myself and if it were not for how badly it would screw my design up, I'd increase it.

very funny, got a laugh out of it the whole way.

this site seems to apply all the points

oh my god some people are just too stupid to smell irony even if it's shoved up their butts...

This is awful advice. This is not web 2.0 at all.

Web 2.0 is not about using big fonts and tags. Its a fundamental shift in architecting web-applications.

Its about thinking about accessibility and cross browser compatibility. Its about using technology to enriching the lives of your users.

It's allowing customers to give you feed back and then you listening.

Web 2.0 is adding a "contact me when someone adds a comment" so I can come back and read what other ridiculous advice you gave someone.

IMO "Web 2.0" is now yesterday's news. These points that are made here are very superficial ways to bring your very old website to LOOK like a site that has been built over the last few months, but good gosh... there is more to building an online success than these suggestions.

People on the cutting edge have already been talking about Web 3.0 for some time now, and if you think about it, in a few months, maybe a year, this will all seem like a trend or the "web fashion" for the times. This crap will pass.

Instead, think of what value can you provide for your site's visitors that your competition cannot. How is what you do (service or product) better, and how do you want to position/relate that message to your visitors?

In the beginning of the web, people (designers/developers/marketers) wanted to get rich quick by putting up a site, do what the big boys were doing, and sit back and let the cash roll in.

There was the great "DOT.Com Crash" in the nineties. Remember?

Things come and go. Web 2.0 will soon be old hat.

Instead, think of long-term "strategeries" for success... LOL, and you will do yourself and your visitors a favor.

PEACE,

As web designer I never used such severe arguments [and guidelines] at the start of a web 2.0 design work. In my opinion, web 2.0 is much more than 12 rules, it's about the renewed user experience which has to be captivating.

Zolatn Sebestyen
RespiroMedia.com

Hmmm. Some good points. Some really retarded points. Bad blogger bad. Obviously doesn't do web design for a living.

Horrible article.
Font size? c',mon! Doesn't define crap to make it web 2.0
Number 12, people don't look at design? Are you kidding me?

I was a little hold back because of your 12 ways title, but you managed to turn me into a positive fan of your post :)

2 more things are perhaps, make widgets from your site, and split your site in to atoms others can use, and let the users with an account import their data from other websites (as threadless.com wonderfully does)

dugg for sad truth

Drupal, blogs, CMS are for people who don't know a thing about building a website but want to call themselves webdesigners. Font sizes around 16px - the fact is it's better to read but it's just a fashion at the moment and probably will change. Do something different, be original - this will never go out of fashion, no matter if it's web2.0 or web12.4.

Dugg! Great post; it's a great, do-this-do-that-and-you're-done kind of post. Added all of them to my to-do list :)

6. Change bookmark this to social network this
At the bottom of this very article it says "bookmark/search this article." I thought we weren't bookmarking things anymore? Oh wait... this article sucks. Thats why it's filled with flaws.

horray we finally got to 1999.

i can never get the time i spent reading this and the comments back, can i? oh dr. who please come rescue me.

This is the worst thing I have ever read! What in the world makes you think there is a Web 2.0? It's not like a new build of the internet has been released! "Web 2.0" is nothing but a buzz word that self importent "bloggers" use to impress people.

12 points to prove the author is a blogger and not a real person.

And I recommend using a framework like symfony, not some stupid non-customized system like Drupal or WordPress.

And 12 is just stupid.

As a designer, thanks for your article. You've got a lot of good, simple points, that will hopefully get other developers thinking. Maybe, they'll move beyond programming simple sites to designing great ones.

Good, interesting article. But reading this suggests, as I've suspected, that there's little difference in content between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, it's just a matter of design or semantics :p

Also you forgot the obligatory "Beta" that should be added to any Web 2.0 logo. This is probably the equivalent of the Web 1.0 Under Construction. "Beta" gives the web site designer:

(a) an excuse if something doesn't work on the site.
(b) the ability to put up a one trick pony site hoping visitors will give them ideas on how to expand.
(c) the added excuse that if it fails they were just trying it out.

dumbest post I ever read!

nice article, how about trying http://cmsmadesimple.org/ for the CMS category. ^^

I thought your article was very interesting, from someone who is only just learning stuff about the web (I'm 34 and we rarely used the net while at uni) so thankyou.

ps whats a siph?

I disagree with this, if you have built a custom CMS and it works, leave it. It may have fewer features than Wordpress or Drupal but if it has the features you need and is lightweight it will be better for you. Many of the big Web 2.0 names certainly aren't using open source CMS softwares.

Otherwise I think you raise some good points.

This is pretty out there, IMO.
I feel like breaking down each of your points and why they aren't that great:

1. A name change doesn't qualify something as web 2.0. Either way, Myspace and eBay are the only 2 major sites that use e or my in the front of their titles...as far as I know of.

2. A font size doesn't qualify something as web 2.0, either.

3,4,5. I'll give you these, especially the email one.

6. yes it's web 2.0 but let me tell you, sites with 15 "Add to furl, add to del.icio.us, digg this, etc" buttons really start to get annoying. Most social bookmarking systems have their own ways of letting people bookmark stuff (like bookmarklets or buttons) on their own.

7. It's web 2.0, but it's stupid and you don't NEED to do this to become web 2.0.

8. Yeah...well, this kinda has to do with how you want to keep up your site, not if it's web 2.0 or not.

9. I rarely see sites with a hit OR visitor counter nowadays...

10. I agree

11. Typically, normal websites do it the first way and blogs do it the 2nd way.

12. that's just fucking stupid.

not of much value, though a good view for beginners ;)

i aggree with you. it is a visitor, not hits. hihihi
thanks.

-IT-

i digg.

How about using the web 2.0 logo generator? How about removing the stock photos you've been using?

Very helpful in changing the look and feel of a web 1.0 site into a web 2.0 site.

http://www.grandstart.com

some of us are over 30 and think this is great advice.
don't listen to the whingers still lamenting the plight of the font tag
dugg.

You forgot that it has to have Google Adsense in at least three of four places. I've got them on my blog too, but does anyone actually click them anymore?

http://knobee.com

You forgot the most important thing

AJAX!

-Greg
http://www.fivezerofive.com

My Anything sounds like kindergarten -- my cubby.

Infantilization went out by 1990 -- or weren't you online then?

Drupal doesn't work in a production situation.

Wordpress is a blog, not a CMS.

Most people want to comment from their bad selves. Like this.

What else can you show me?

There was no web in the 80s. It was invented in 1989, but the first client and server weren't written until 1990.

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

People didn't start doing web design of any type until Mosaic came out in 1993. It picked up with the release of Netscape Navigator in 1994. E-commerce picked up from there.

So, really, you're complaining about late 90s design.

You weren't even alive in the 80s, were you?

13. Write yet another how-to-web-2 list and post it on digg.

You left out the most obvious: drop a vowel so you can have a poxy name like Flickr or Scibd :-)