How website design has developed over the past 20 years

• By Andrew
• General News
• 9336 Views
• 31st August 2016

On 23rd August 1991 the Internet was released to the public for the first time, making the internet 25 years old.

As with any technology related industry, website design has developed rapidly across the last 25 years and as such an important anniversary was marked this week we thought we’d explore the history of website design and how it has developed and progressed since the 1990s and what we expect to come in the following years.

How website design has changed

Early 1990s

Tim Berners-Lee created the first ever website in 1991.

As you can imagine, web design in the early 1990s was completely different to what we know today, for example users had to wait for minutes for a single image to load never mind being able to view and navigate a whole website in seconds.

With text based websites at the forefront of website design, images were rarely used and when they where they couldn’t be loaded on the same page as text.

Mid 1990s

By the mid-1990s using images in a website design had become normal practice, mandatory in fact, however the overall website design would still be very basic and nowhere near the quality of the graphics that we are able to use in modern website design.

We had to cut up our images into smaller sections and organised them as tables which made them easier to work with and also changed the way websites were created.

Rather than competing based on search engine ranking, in the mid-1990s websites were judged based on how they looked in comparison to their competitors – making website design essential for standing out against other companies online.

Late 1990s

The late 1990s really saw all businesses looking to build a website to showcase their company’s services, the need for having a website to generate business had started to begin.

Huge advancements in the late 1990s meant that website design was now seen as a separate entity to web development, users were now looking for stylish websites that were created specifically for their business.

Website design started to become a focus and people, just like our team, began to learn the art of website design.

2000s

In the early 2000s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allowed us to create graphics separately from website content.

CSS also enabled us to define the most important elements of the web page such as text size, font and background colour etc – making the process of coding a website much quicker and time effective, also allowing us to set the brand of the company during the website design stage.

Mid 2000s

Even though JavaScript was introduced in 1995 it only really took off in the mid-2000s and meant that we saw new features introduced to website design and development, such as:

• Top navigation menus
• Drop down menus
• Web forms

With the rise of search engine optimisation, we were facing more important issues such as the need for Meta Data on each page and having a good website structure in place.

2016 and beyond – the evolution of website design

Using HTML5 and CSS3 we are able to create bespoke websites with a comprehensive content management system integrated into the backend allowing businesses to expand their online presence easily.

Website design has now become more than just about having a more attractive website than competitors, it is now become a way to grow your business, generating leads and sales just from online activities.

If you are looking for a reliable white-label website development and design company, contact our team on 01257 758078.