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Wikipedia.org offers the following definition for "Web 2.0":

"'Web 2.0' is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies."

By itself, however, Web 2.0 has come to mean so many things as to mean next to nothing. As award-winning South Florida Website Design guru Bruce Arnold noted recently in his RSS-syndicated series Web Design with Results in Mind™, "First coined by Tim O'Reilly (or was it Dale Dougherty?) in 2004 (or was it 2005?), 'Web 2.0' is now one of the most overused yet poorly-defined buzzwords on the Internet. Despite the paradox, you'll find it referenced in articles on topics ranging from SaaS to Sasquatch ... as if it were something tangible ... or at least a clearly-defined concept. It is neither. As Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee sagely observed in 2006, 'nobody knows what it means'!"

Now two years later, the issue is no longer that nobody knows what Web 2.0 means. Instead, the challenge is that it has come to mean so many different things, to so many different people, that it can only be defined in context. Designing websites for Web 2.0 is a good example. One contributor to the social networking website Squidoo.com asserted that "'Web 2.0 design has no definition, yet it is widely recognizable. Consisting of a light and 'easy on the eyes' look, Web 2.0 design utilizes whitespace with bright, vivid colors and gradients... Links are bright and typically neon in color, and color combinations themselves are heavily contrasted against their backdrop (color patterns such as white, neon green and fuchsia make for an eye-appealing mix). Overall, Web 2.0 typically borrows from minimalist styles - where 'less is more.'"

That's a good start. But web professionals who design with results in mind know there's more to Web 2.0 than whitespace, bright colors and gradient shading. The flash-enhanced page source generating those minimalist masterpieces should empower business website owners to dynamically leverage the potential of their web marketing and ecommerce resources, along with that of the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) platforms from which they operate. Those web pages should be written in tableless XHTML and CSS for streamlined, SEO-friendly delivery of semantics separated from syntax, and content apart from form. They should also be validated for compliance with applicable W3C coding standards and accessibility guidelines. And most importantly, every aspect of presentation and optimization should reflect an understanding of this fundamental online marketing equation:

Success = Traffic x Conversion