Web design

Reminiscing on Two Decades of Web Design

The internet has come a long way since its inception in the 1960’s. What started as a communication toolbetween researchers at three Universities evolved into the World Wide Web that we know today. It has become the norm to use the internet for everything from shopping to dating. In a previous article, we saw how companies with great websites tend to perform better these days. Just as the internet as evolved, so has web design. Let’s take a look at how programming techniques and languages have changed over the past two decades.

Web design

Early 1990’s

With the internet being a fairly new concept to the general public, the first sites were fairly simple. Most were strictly text based, using first generation HTML (Hypertext Markup Language.) On the World Wide Web, you could only view simple text pages; however, this quickly evolved to incorporate images. Basically, the first websites were mostly text, with some simple images, and not much imagination or fancy graphics – but it gave people a convenience that they had never had before.

Mid and late 1990’s

Text still dominated most sites well into the late 1990’s, although text effects were starting to be added. Text could roll across the screen, move, and stand out better, using tools like Flash. Sites also started using scroll bars and coloured text. Hit counters at the bottom of websites became extremely popular.

Everyone wanted to online by the late ‘90s, and businesses were discovering that having a website was crucial for their success. Music was being added to sites, and text could change colour when clicked on.

People wanted their sites to stand out and get noticed, so table-based designs were becoming popular by the late ‘90s. Tables allowed you to create sites with several sections and columns, making for a more dynamic layout that looked better than just text.

Page builders like Geocities and Angelfire gained a reputable presence. They allowed users to interact better with the internet and made it easier than ever to get on the World Wide Web.

2000’s

Right around the turn of the century, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) became quite popular. These allowed users to alter and change an array of features on websites, such as text size, background colour and text style. Programmers no longer had to create single pages anymore; instead, they could simply write code that would ‘cascade’ to each page within one website. You can find out a lot more about CSS on this quality resource.

Javascript gained prominence in this era, even though it had been around for at least ten years prior. This allowed websites to incorporate drop-down menus, web forms and navigation pages.

Websites became the ultimate tool for businesses and SEO, keywords and meta-tags became critical to getting found on the internet, and web programmers had to learn how to incorporate these elements into their designs.

Today

Today, few would argue against the benefits of having a website, both for personal and business purposes. James at Cocoonfxmedia, web design, Birmingham, explains that today. “The options for websites are immeasurable. We have WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, magenta. We have PHP, HTML, ASP. And that isn’t considering all the do-it-yourself website platforms out there. The market has truly evolved into a huge beast, where it is increasingly difficult to stand out.”

As Andy says, while there are many tools and resources that can guide a non-techie through the process, programmers are still in high demand. Today’s websites use tools such as flat design, parallax and responsive web design. It will be interesting to see how many changes will take place in the next two decades. One thing is for sure video is going to be a major part of the web in the future; as we are already seeing.