Hey this is a timely post because the Web 2.0 Awards just came out. There's a ton of sites on here you may not know about but are exemplary in their area: http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short. Altho, most of those sites are winners due to function not fashion.

cheers, ryness.

indeed, tho, i'm more interested in usability than appearance with this as i've seen so many web apps that are all about the aesthetic and so lose a great deal of value.

excellent idea! thanks, man!

i totally forgot about this.

=
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In the interest and order of simplicity:

http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/
http://www.google.com

and for all you slashdotters,

http://cowboyneal.org

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm -- Web 2.0 == poor design?

No - just that web 2.0 doesn't equal automatic good site design. There's just no replacement for well thought out interface, navigation, flow. To me, what is known as "Web 2.0" is a set of tools and the shifting the onus of content creation to your users, not your tech staff.

i really like the looks of this one: http://www.roisure.com/ and this one: http://www.brightfinance.co.uk/

Try this:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Clean Web 2.0(ish)

I like www.ictsc.com its simple and contains just enough functionality to be useful and pretty, (click on one of the photo's) - also they have a nice photo gallery merged and embedded into the site (www.ictsc.com/photo) and also a cool set of useful on-line tools at www.ictsc.com/resources.htm. Its not overly beautiful but in my opinion its done right. I cant think of anything that I hate more than flash infested sites, or excessive Java script - especially when it either doesn't degrade, or worse is unusable. Its a shame that there is no indication of who did the web design work though, My schoo (I teach) in Leeds could do with a site that was both aesthetically pleasing and functional, rather than being one or the other. Must be something to do with designers either producing ugly monstrosities in FrontPage or Pretty Flops in Dreamweaver

As for site designs, there is a designer by the name of andreas who does a lot of free templates (stick andreas01 into google... His templates are pretty as hell, and still functional, and shouldn't be too hard to bring into the whole web 2.0 thing. One question though
, the previous poster mentioned http://www.roisure.com/ and http://www.brightfinance.co.uk, are either of them web 2.0? Neither is very interactive. Is web 2.0 coming to mean simply that they have that blocky cartoony look? I thought for it to be web2.0 you needed to be using something that was a web 2.0 technology such as ajax (or anything that allows modifications to an already loaded page...)

Anyway just my 2c
May be just me though...

http://www.bestwebawards.com/