We started noticing a trend in big city developers to move towards standards and sites without many photos. Photos have become a thing of the past as a header graphic or space filler in web sites. Instead, practical and useful graphics and screenshots have replaced the archaic methods of web development. Don’t even get me started on stock photography — All I need to say is that unless it is directly related to your concept, nobody cares about the random people dressed in business suits shaking hands anymore.
The wide adoption of CSS in the past couple of years is transforming the way people think about web design. It’s funny though, because all of this technology has existed for many years but just now is being popularized through the concepts of “Web 2.0“. The Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0 has this amazing graphic which explains in a nutshell what all the new hype is about: