Web Design, Marketing Trends 2005

With 2006 only a couple months away, its a good time to review some trends in web design and marketing over the past year that have made their mark. Here are just a few of the trends in 2005:

• Google Everywhere - Seems like everyone these days is trying to emulate the search engine leader.
• Blogs - Blogs continue to evolve as a marketing medium, but have created problems of their own. (splogs)
  
• Rich Media Ads - Go from WOW to, "Arrrrgh! Not another one." Video becomes more of a player in this area. Still some very impressive click through numbers for this relatively new method of advertising.
  
• Text Ads - Text ads take over as the preferred method of advertising. Not much creativity here, but very cheap to produce and easy to manage.
  
• Big Images and Big Flash - Images and flash in letterbox format seem to dominate many websites home pages and marketing realestate. This trend will probably continue due to broadband adoption being over the 50% mark in 05.