Designing distant education portal matching web standards in accordance with new approaches brought into design by web 2.0

As the conventional education fails to meet the demands of modern education, it has caused some concepts to come out like distance learning. Distance learning combines the elements of ?face to face education? and ?education every time and everywhere?. Along with the increase in the use of computer technologies in distance learning, visual design has come into prominence. Parallel to this, thanks to the developing education softwares, educators in collaboration with designers have needed to develop education material. The prepared education materials enable the students to learn faster and more easily without place and time constraints. As well as the content of the education given, the way the education is provided is also significantly important. In the design of the web pages, employing the visual elements effectively and applying the web standards increase the productivity and the speed in distant education, and turn the education into a funnier and lasting fashion. In the design of the Distance Learning Portal of Afyon Kocatepe University prepared through adopting the new approaches and technologies in designing brought out by Web 2.0, it is aimed to increase the users? social interaction and to allow the users of an opportunity to share information. Firstly, in the coding of the pages CSS and XHTML technologies have been made use of by separating structure and the presentation, and then by fulfilling the web standards completely, the austerities such as access into the content and pages have been reduced to minimum level, and lastly, the ease of use has been achieved by categorizing the menus connected to each other.