Well as I sit here after waking up at the ungodly hour of 7.30am I started to think about what's going to happen in 2004 with regards to web sites and search engines.

A number of mainstream sites are going to switch from using google as its search engine so although 2003 was quite hard for some 2004 is going to get a lot harder. Getting a top 5 placement on Google is fairly easy but time consuming. The problem is the new engines will probably not like or use the same methods to rank a site as google which then brings up the problem of optimising a site for multiple engines which is never an easy feat to achieve. I already have plans in motion to try and combat what I suspect will happen but one thing is for sure; I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on sites/forums and newsgroups to see what's happening as it happens.

2004 is also going to be a wakeup call for tens of thousands of web sites which will become illegal in October 2004. My estimates are that as much as 90% of the web sites in the UK will still be illegal in by then.

Web design has seen a complete turn around this year with many people finally understanding that complex and graphic heavy sites do not fair well with the surfing public. There has been quite a shift in the way people design web sites and I forsee a larger move towards css in 2004.

Although many professional and non-professional web designers do not cater for older broswers such as NS4 I forsee that the mainstream professionals will also start dropping support for these old browsers as CSS really starts taking off. I personally stopped catering for NS4 in the summer of this year because I wanted to use the power the CSS much more.

2004 is going to see some fairly big changes in web design and promotion and those not keeping tabs on the changes are going to be in for a big shock.