What will Twitter do to Web Design?

For many people, Social Media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) is the way they find lots of new and interesting sites and experiences on the Internet. This can be friends posting links to interesting info, celebrities promoting sites, columnists pushing up their readership numbers or increasingly businesses using SM to promote their goods and services. 
 
Many ways now exist for websites to generate Twitter or Facebook links directly from their pages. This enables the public to quickly and easily share their discoveries without faffing around with link shorteners and separate SM logins etc. This can generate significant traffic and hopefully business for websites as they are effectively co-opting their readers into being free Publicity and Marketing agents for them. 
 
So what does this mean for webdesign? 
 
When I first started in the Internet business, web sites had to be designed to suit the lowest common denominator of viewer. This meant 640*480 screens 16000 (or even 256) colours and designs that could be transmitted over a 9.6kbit/s phone connection. Now websites can be stuffed with millions of colours, huge screen resolutions flash animation and need Megabit sized broadband speeds to download acceptably. 
 
This, of course, assumes everyone is sitting in front of a high spec, large screen PC able to run all this stuff when in fact many people will be viewing sites via iPhones, Blackberries other smartphones or iPads each with their own capabilities and limitations. Anyone trying to view websites on a tiny Blackberry screen using GPRS will understand what a limitation this imposes and what a struggle it can be. 
 
This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for web designers. They need to use the opportunity of having viewers promote content via SM to increase their readership, but also recognize the audience out there using mobile devices and offer lighter, simpler and smaller web experiences that can be used on these devices. 
 
This could be via intelligent systems which recognize these devices and deliver adapted content (the bbc site is a notable one for this) or perhaps the use of specific micro-sites able to deliver cut-down content. 
 
Either way designers will need to adapt to the changing landscape of delivery systems and networks. 
 
Those designers brought up in the first generation of web design may have a lot to teach the new mobile, SM aware Internet. 
 
Karl Meyer
www.spice.co.uk
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