Hardly anyone knew what a website was in the mid 1990s. From around 1995 through 2006, the number and type of website designs vastly increased, offering a huge variety of content. These websites included internet storefronts and information portals. Websites created during this time (known as Web 1.0 sites) mostly consisted of alternatives to "mainstream" types of communication media. They had copies of content that already existed in print, audio or video formats.

A modern website is much more than a magazine ever was or ever could be. You aren't simply reading content any more. Now you can interact and feel like you are part of the whole experience. The internet is a whole new medium of communication, not just another way to view a newspaper or read a book. So what are the new techniques of website design that has made the field so interesting?

The most important thing to remember when creating a website is that CONTENT IS KING! If your website does not have interesting content like updated information and interested products or services, it will not attract a lot of visitors. The design of your website should focus on attracting visitors and making them want to come back to the site. No matter how sophisticated your website is, visitors will not remain on the site without interesting content. One easy way that designers can use to keep visitors is to establish a blog on the site. The blog can either showcase the items for sale or provide commentary and opinions on the content of the site.

Another step that developers may consider in regard to website design is to let the site visitors interact with the site. Clearly, website surfers like to give comments on the sites that they have been to. Blogs frequently have hundreds of such comments on articles, newspapers frequently let the visitors comment on the articles, and many online stores let customers review products bought on the site. Encouraging this sort of interaction will serve a number of purposes, from adding useful content to the site (product reviews, for instance) to giving the site visitors a sense of ownership of the site. Such interactivity will improve any website.

Modern website designers can use tools that allow the viewer to interact with the site. Gone are the days when you simply looked at a page and the most you could do then was click a hyper link that would take you to another page. Now a website can have applications that seem to make it come alive. We can't get into all the details here, but applications such as JAVA scripting, AJAX, Flash players, and CSS design techniques make web pages look like a complete desktop application.

In the old days of website design, all a person had to do was pick out colors, fonts, core images, and a general page layout. Those days are ending. Such static, in-the-box thinking is no longer sufficient. They are core elements of good design and should certainly be incorporated in any site that wants to be successful, but more is needed to make a modern website stand out.