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A recent survey of devout Web surfers shows that people’s online expectations have skyrocketed over the last few years and they’re quick to reject any Web site that doesn’t keep up.

We ask 16 of your peers about the technologies and innovations that are changing their jobs.

DHTML solves business problems. It can be used to augment traditional, document-oriented sites as well as serve as the platform for a new breed of Web-based applications. When was the last time you needed scalable graphics and typography, animation, or sound to solve your business problems?

Blogs offer the insightful marketer a potent new tool for gathering intelligence. Public awareness of blogs is rapidly growing, making the investment in time needed to get familiar with them well worth the effort.

The Web is a medium where the impact of your message depends as much on the skills of your audience as the experience of your Web team. Creating an effective Web site requires you to plan around the characteristics that make your customers and prospects unique. This means all of your customers and prospects — those who are Web experts, as well as those who aren’t, and the folks who’ve been customers for years, as well as those who’ve never visited you before.

The world is producing content at an extraordinary rate. However, people’s capacity to read content remains basically the same. What percentage of the content that you publish on your website is actually being read? What are you going to do with the content which is never read?

PROBLEM: DREAMWEAVER 4 FALLS SHORT in its ability to produce wellformed, standardscompliant markup.

SOLUTION: You can easily harness Dreamweaver’s two greatest strengths, its flexibility and its user community, to make it one of the best tools on the market for producing good XHTML. This article will tell you how. With a few tweaks, hacks and extensions, you’ll be able to produce sites that validate, and to clean up legacy pages. Set aside an hour or two, follow these directions, and fall in love with Dreamweaver all over again.

One of the hottest topics these days in Information Architecture circles is documentation. This is probably partly because the IA’s role is so ill defined. Our jobs sit perched between engineering and graphic design: go too far in one direction, we’re doing the coding, go to far in the other and we are doing the design. Neither role maximizes the architect’s key skills; defining the organizational structure and behavior of the web site or application.

There’s never an appropriate moment for an economic downturn, but for the information architecture community, the recent shift has been particularly ill-timed. Just as we were beginning to make some headway in making the case for the value of our contribution to the ‘Web design’ process, economic pressures are forcing us to evangelize ourselves even more vigorously, as we face heightened skepticism from clients pressured by economic circumstances and weary from five years of dot-com snake oil sales pitches.

In the not-so-distant past, it was commonplace to use HTML hacks, workarounds, and proprietary tags and attributes to build sites. But hacks and workarounds just don’t cut it with the current disparate state of operating systems, hardware, and browsers. We need detail, and we need an understanding of how markup really functions.