Web Developer’s Journal: Web Site Trends

By Andrew
Starling, Web
Developer’s Journal

How are sites changing? Where are we heading? There’s remarkably
little information on the Internet about the changing fashions in
site design and technology, but here’s a quick glimpse into what’s
going on.

In many ways site design has stabilized over the last year or
so. The big corporations who now dominate the Web have brought
stability, and maybe a touch of dullness too.

They’re all big fans of usability theory – the science of how
easy sites are to use. So it’s goodbye to the old days of in your
face graphics and fancy backgrounds. Heavily graphical sites are
still out there, but most of them are in league division two. All
the premiership sites are slick, fast-loading, plain and look
pretty much the same as each other.

Here’s a straw-poll survey of ten top sites. They may not be the
all-time top ten most popular sites on the Web, but they’re close,
and they do represent the top ten Web properties as defined by
MediaMetrix.

Home pages of ten popular sites

Note: Where the JavaScript column shows a dash “-“, this
indicates no obvious client-side JavaScript in the source file, but
hidden JavaScript might be used. Widths show the target window
width, not the exact width of the page.

What hits you straight away is the consistency of style. These
Web pages are wearing conservative lounge suits. White backgrounds,
black text and blue links are almost obligatory, with only a few
minor touches of originality. Pretty much every home page looks
like the content page of a magazine (maybe even the same
magazine).

From the visitor’s point of view, all this consistency is
probably a good thing. Thin files containing very little formatting
download in a trice. There’s plenty of comforting familiarity and
next to no confusion. The existence of what amounts to a
house-style across the Web (and its simplicity) is one of the
strongest signs that in the space of a couple of years the Web has
moved from a minority pursuit to a mainstream medium.

Not much joy if you’re a graphic designer though, or even a page
designer. Whole hours and tens of dollars must have gone into the
design of those identikit pages. If graphics are your bag, you
won’t find your services in high demand by the top sites.

More joy if you’re a programmer. JavaScript is almost
everywhere. One of its more interesting uses is resizing pages
according to window size. This is popular because visitors are
still split between 640 pixel wide windows and 800 wide. So our
straw poll shows no clear pattern in pixel widths for fixed pages,
instead a fairly even split between 640 and 800. Two years ago
everybody designed for 640. It looks like 800 is either catching up
or has already caught up.

Servers

There’s a broad spread of server software too. A year ago, a
study by e-gineer.com showed
that Apache, IIS and Netscape shared almost exactly equal
popularity in the top 130 sites. That study hasn’t been repeated
this year, but on the Web as a whole, Apache is racing ahead.

In this respect, the top 130 sites are not very representative
of the entire Web, a fact which was recognized in the original
study.

Netcraft is the best site
for server statistics, and its latest study, covering an outrageous
17 million sites, shows Apache in a commanding and ever increasing
lead, with 63% of the server software market, and MS trailing
second with just 21%, with no other brand holding more than
10%.

Browsers

At least Microsoft can take comfort in the browser wars. About
18 months ago the split between Netscape and Microsoft was 50/50.
Then along came IE5 and Netscape lost the way, though its decline
does appear to be bottoming out.

The current figures from Browser Watch show IE with a 59%
market share and Netscape on 26%. Our logs at the Web Developer’s
Journal show a slightly worse decline, with 75% for IE and just 20%
for Netscape.

The inside story at Mozilla is that Netscape is trying to speed
up the development of N6, with the aim of releasing it late this
year. But unless they get an unusually smooth ride, it’s more
likely to be out next spring.

Crystal Ball Time

And now for some predictions.

First, graphics. PNG has been around for some time now, yet the
take-up is so small it’s barely measurable. SVG looks more
promising, but before it can take off it will need integral support
in browsers. N6 won’t support it, so it looks like being next
year’s technology. For now we’ll be sticking with good old GIFs and
JPEGs.

On the original content front, the Web is due for a shake-up.
The reduction in value of dotcoms, combined with heavy discounting
on banner ad rates, means that many content providers can’t make a
profit from original content. The cost and return figures just
don’t work out, and in this new, realistic Internet environment,
that’s a big deal.

This will have a significant impact on the way the Web looks.
Many content providers will make better use of existing material
and emphasize reference over topicality. Meanwhile the successful
topical content providers will be able to get their content
repeated on more channels.

It’s a change that’s already in progress, but expect it to speed
up as dotcoms run out of money. Fast-changing content will be
rarer, yet repeated on a very large number of mirrors. Even now, if
you take an Associated Press news story from about five months ago,
select some specific text and enter it into AltaVista, you’ll find
a hundred or so sites repeated the exact same story.

Finally the good news, and once again it’s programmers who are
the beneficiaries. There’s plenty going on at the server end. Last
summer, e-gineer found that 70% of the top 130 Web sites used CGI.
ASP is well established, and PHP turns up surprisingly often. Yet
surely the server technology that’s on the rampage right now is
Java. Java servlets and Java Server Pages offer great flexibility
and are only limited by the availability of programmers to apply
them.

So that’s it for this round-up of trends. More plain pages, less
graphics, less original content and plenty of overworked
programmers at the server end. See you at Java nightschool.