What will the future of websites be?

This is a kind of trick question in itself as everybody has a personal point of view. We can however offer some directions in terms of web design. We do have trends in the web design world. Showcase galleries and trend setting sites like Smashing Magazine or Noupe are great web designing elements that witness the good health of the industry. The 2.0 trend in the web world is not only the eye candy overflow to which some web designers stick, it is the coming of age of tools, applications and their use by any person, programmer or not, web designer or not.

Will there be a Web 3.0. I don’t know. To me it will only be another shift in the use of applications and technology. Huge quakes are shattering the technology world (Oracle and Sun, Microsoft and Yahoo!) and they all have a certain impact on the way the web will evolve as well as its use. The forthcoming innovations might as well change our perspective. What about the full Web OS that certain people used to talk about? This would imply that the whole concept of web designing would change. Accessibility, usability and so many other fields would take new ventures.

Even today things are changing. The web designer’s work’s breadth might change. New tools are currently allowing the user to change its use of the web. An example is the customize your web plugin for Firefox. It gives the user possibilities to modify the view of a page. Add colours and even move blocks around the page.

What this plugin presupposes, is that the future of the web might just be the construction of a canvas that people will customise just like it is for, say, iGoogle. All websites will be personalised at large according to the user and by the user. For example Paige Hemmis might as well turn the Web Design Bureau all pink and lovely just as she browses over it (which I’m sure she never does ) but anyway, you grab the concept.

This would actually be a pure offspring of the Web 2.0 culture: the user taking even more over the web by taking over the website itself. This would also mean that accessibility would be modified to its core. A person might need more contrast and instantly redesign the site and use it, another might as well strip the site of its images… This might just be what’s in for us web designers.