Many companies in the Philadelphia area have successfully used the paid hosting version of WordPress to create a website that is virtually impossible to spot as a blog. In fact, I’d bet that a lot of the Philadelphia website design in the past year have been using the WordPress software as a content management system. With WordPress you can create static HTML pages that search engines love to index.

WordPress has hundreds of free themes you can customize to create your site if you are not a developer. However, most Philadelphia Website Design firms will create a custom style sheet and apply that to the WordPress software for a completely unique website containing your branding, graphics and unique style. WordPress has a library full of thousands of plugins that extend its functionality and allow developers to make use of code that others have already tested. Developers can also add to the open source library of plugins and widgets. There are thousands of very talented developers involved in adding onto WordPress.

In addition to all the WordPress plugins you can use to customize your site and add functionality, there are also a host of other open source applications that interface quite well with WordPress. For instance, the JQuery library has numerous animations and uses of Ajax already written for your website design. Since newer websites use more animation to hold user’s attention, these JQuery applications can really save developers time.

Finally WordPress is really a well-designed Content Management System (CMS) that makes posting a new page or editing a page intuitive and fast. The publishing process in WordPress is much easier than in other open CMS systems like Joomla or Drupal. The publishing process happens in a logical order and while full of features, is easy to manage. People with absolutely no programming experience easily use WordPress to maintain their own web pages.

Sue McCrossin owns Boomtown Internet Group a Web Design Philadelphia firm utilizing Word Press as a CMS development tool. We are dedicated Philadelphia Web Design company providing various web design & development services.

Visit the Author's website: http://www.boomtownig.com/

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Of course web design is somewhat like fashion, trendy and beautiful in the eyes of the designer. However there are a few classic design trends that I believe will continue throughout 2010 and beyond.

Content Management Systems ““ these types of websites can actually save you money on maintenance. Open source CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal have matured into wonderful website template architectures with purely customizable themes. You no longer have to make a trade off between boxy, ridged design versus the ability to edit and create your own pages if you don’tknow a program language. These architectures also make use of CSS (cascading style sheets) and very search engine friendly structures, which is an added bonus. Many developers prefer using these CMS systems because it makes programming quicker and easier.

Social Applications - I don’tthink the social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are going to go away, so websites will have to begin interacting more with them, and include more social aspects like events, comments, ratings, forums, and interactivity. This means that developers will be using more 3rd party libraries which use AJAX like mootools, jquery and prototype for interactive buttons, and frameworks like zend, cakephp, and symfony to handle the complex interactivity between applications.

Mobile phones ““ make sure your website works well on most mobile devices, especially the iPhone and Blackberry. Also make sure your website and blog are connected to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. There are about 22.4 million internet phone users searching the web for news and information. According to ComScore the number of users has doubled from last year. ComScore also says that more than 9 million users are accessing social sites from their mobile devices ““ this includes blogs and social networks. While you are designing that new website for 2010, make sure you consider that your visitors may be searching for you and researching you while they are on the move, not just when they are in front of their office or home computers.

The “Look“ of the website ““ a website is sort of like a car or a kitchen. You can almost tell what year it was designed by the colors, fonts, and general layout. The trends for 2010 include design aspects borrowed from print. This includes a design grid type style with lots of white space, large type (for increasingly aging users), mixing illustrations and textures with actual photos and videos, colorful designs, and a clear navigation path. Less seems to be more in website design this year. Greens and earth tones also seem to be popular as people seek more ecological and organic looking websites. Even logos seem to be trending away from glossy designs to textured, organic designs.

Fonts using sIFR - Scalable Inman Flash Replacement has been around for a couple of years, but designers are just starting to really make use of it by creating customized titles using JavaScript, Flash, and CSS. Instead of creating cool looking fonts for titles with images, sIFR can dynamically create text using whatever font you want. The search engines and visitors with non-Flash browsers can also still read the text (but of course it won’tlook beautiful to them).

Photo and Video ““ A trend with faster internet connections is the ability to show video and photos of real people, rather than scaled down graphics which load faster. In 2009 video was a big part of many sites, and I see this trend continuing and increasing as the technology becomes easier and easier to use.

Short pages ““ Google Caffeine will probably shape the design trends in 2010 as developers quickly try to make sure that their sites continue to rank in the new search algorithm. Some things we already know about Caffeine are that website pages should be shorter and focused on a single topic, and that current pages with fast load times will rank higher in search results.

Web design in Philadelphia for 2010 will be a continuation of the trends that started last year, with an emphasis on usability and interaction. Since US web design jobs are predicted to grow by about 10% through 2016, and web development jobs are going to grow by about 30% in that same time period, the trend toward more web design in Philadelphia seems justified.

Bio: Sue McCrossin owns Boomtown Internet Group, a specialist in Web Design in Philadelphia area. Boomtown Internet Group is a web design company in Philadelphia whose services include Web Development & Internet Marketing.

Visit the Author's website: http://www.boomtownig.com/

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