The web was not crowded "in the beginning" as the author says. Most of the sites I visited used a lot of text with minimal markup and few images. Here's a pag

The web was not crowded "in the beginning" as the author says. Most of the sites I visited used a lot of text with minimal markup and few images. Here's a page I stumbled across that was obviously from the mid-90s (I was searching for the URL in one of the links on this guy's site) http://www.rett.org/about/oldsites/rettsitev2/pages/links.html http://www.rett.org/about/oldsites/rettsitev2/pages/links.ht... Good page design has always been clean and focused. It doesn't have to look like Web 2.0. http://www.homestarrunner.com http://www.homestarrunner.com is clean and focused. But it doesn't look like Web 2.0 at all. Penny-Arcade looks cluttered at first glance, except it's a gaming fansite and the flashy advertisements are part of its style. Once that is considered, the site appears very clean and focused. It's also not typical "Web 2.0" style. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/11/21 http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/11/21 "Facebookery") Avoiding gratuitous decoration is just good design. Feel free to add as much complexity as you can, just don't let it detract from the purpose of the site.