The internerd is the hottest thing since sliced bread, so it’s only natural that there’d be a hott new craze sweeping the web approximately every other week. Here are some hot-ass internet bandwagons for you to jump on ASAP.

  • Those Little Buttons With Pixelated Text They could be for a CMS, your website, your OS, a browser, or your dog, but one thing’s for sure: they are freaking everywhere. Be careful and only use a couple, though. It’s not hard to go overboard./li>
  • Red Cross Buttons Or worse, Red Cross splash pages. Yes, the disasters are very disastrous, and it’s very novel that sites want to help, but do these things work? Did they even exist before the tsunami last year? Now, in the wake of another distaster, they’re all over the place. That last one’s pretty sexy though. You may ask what the point is – will the five people who visit your site change their minds about donating thanks to the Red Cross on your site about cars? I guess businesses must do it so they don’t seem insensitive, so you should too because if you don’t you are heartless and will die an early death and go to Hell. HELL!
  • Drop Shadows Are either in or out, along with horizontal hairlines and making things look like they’re all glossy. If you have a site that is totally flat, sorry, you’re not cool so you’d better get some gradients in there hurry-up soon.
  • CSS …is a fad in the same way the iPod is. It came out, some people liked it; it got better, more people liked it and then it just kind of stuck around accumulating more and more users. Eventually everyone will use CSS and have iPods, like it or not, including you. That’s just how it goes with these things.
  • del.icio.us According to Time who gets their information from Technorati, this is the most popular weblog, which surprised me because I didn’t even know it was a weblog. Regardless, it’s cool and useful and relatively easy to import the content into your own site (hell, I figured out how to do it!) and that makes it a staple. You’ll need to watch this one though. Make sure the links you add are cool enough for all you web-friends to see. They won’t visit you anymore if you start linking to the latest Barbie video game or a bug that pretends it’s a tongue.
  • Useless Lists If you haven’t already, you need to post one of these STAT.
  • Blogs Duh, get a blog already. Otherwise how are you going to meet all these other criteria? Which gives way to…
  • Accessible CMS CMS = Content Management System = WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, etc. We don’t “hand-code” our entries. What is this, the stone age? It’s gotta be dynamic! It’s gotta have comments! The content is optional, though, and if it overshadows your wicked look, you Red-Cross button, or your del.icio.us links, than it may be best to leave it out. Another one of those fads that stuck around (thankfully), your site is potentially marginally cool if you are on Blogger, cooler if it’s WordPress, and the effing rawk if it’s on Movable Type or some other pay thing. If you wrote your CMS yourself, you may be hardcore but that doesn’t make you cool.

Once you have all of these things, put them together and viola! Your site is the new black!