What The Past Teaches Us About Web Design & Development’s Future
Every business can benefit a lot from a nicely built website. It is the age of digital revolution. You cannot make a fortune if you don’t know how to utilize the rich resources on the net. The ever-improving mobile platform has also further ensured the importance of a business site. The Web Design and development process has gone through multiple changes since inception. Just like any form of technology, it will always evolve into a more advanced version of itself.
Every business can benefit a lot from a nicely built website. It is the age of digital revolution. You cannot make a fortune if you don’t know how to utilize the rich resources on the net. The ever-improving mobile platform has also further ensured the importance of a business site. The Web Design and development process has gone through multiple changes since inception. Just like any form of technology, it will always evolve into a more advanced version of itself.
The Earlier Days
In the beginning, everything was dark. The interface only had a black screen and text output. In the year 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser containing texts with embedded links leading to other pages. It was not until the year 1993 that we saw the appearance of images alongside the texts with the introduction of the Mosaic browser.
HTML was used to create the various pages of a site. However, the biggest change was brought by the arrival of the Netscape browser. It became an instant hit among the users and companies with the famous quote “Best if viewed in Netscape”. It had given several companies a major tool for advertising. How can we forget the garish ads after its arrival?
The Middle-Phase
It was an interesting period as many of the current technologies related to Web Design and development was launched during this time. HTML was not able to exactly perform some of the interesting tasks at that time. JavaScript was born to provide dynamic content in a perfect way. The golden innovation of that period was born to provide further creativity i.e. the flash. It literally changes the way people use to view content on the websites.
It worked like magic despite taking heavy resources while being closed-source and unfriendly to search engines. The users need to have the latest flash plugin to view the content embedded in flash. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers also born at this phase and provided amazing features to the users. PHP, ASP and the now familiar CSS were also launched to provide further improvements on the design and functionality of the web pages.
The biggest change happened after the launch of the mighty Google in 1998. At that time nobody imagined the way Google will revolutionize the way we search things on the web in the coming years. It currently is the single biggest internet technology firm affecting countless industries in the world. After the arrival of WordPress, an open-source blogging & content management system, many things related to content publishing has changed tremendously.
The Last Decade
This was the time period when the World Wide Web witnessed the rise of several technologies. Long scrolling designs, drop shadow, Skeuomorphism and stock photography has started to show their true power on the web. The internet giant, Google, launched the Chrome browser in the year 2008. It was designed to compete with the most-used browser of that time i.e. Internet Explorer. Right now, Chrome is the leading browser in terms of users in the world.
Apple, another behemoth in technology, launched their first smartphone i.e. the first generation iPhone in the year 2007, practically heralding a new era of responsive design. In the coming years, flat & responsive design, JavaScript animations, animated GIFs, parallax, vector images ruled the internet. The launch of HTML5 gave designers and programmers the freedom to use rich media in the creation of interactive web pages.
The Current Scenario
At present, the emphasis is on increasing the visibility of the sites or in other words visibility of the brands. SEO is the hot keyword here. All the links and pages should be highly optimized according to SEO to get the best results for any website. Needless to say, the designing of the web pages should also be SEO optimized to attract the right amount of traffic over the net.
The challenges are stiff nowadays due to the huge numbers of websites offering the same service or products. The companies to stay ahead in the race by creating pages that can be found easily in the search results of the popular search engines. The digital marketing has evolved into a serious thing for any organization that wants to showcase its products or services to the rest of the world.
Skeleton screens are becoming quite popular. They are the hollow screens that fill up your screen during the loading of any pages. For the normal people, it seems that the page is loading while it is actually just a design element to deceive the normal perception of the human eye. It’s a small yet effective way of designing responsive web pages.
The Future Of Web Design And Development
Like every other technology, we have to move forward with new and creative ideas. The focus currently is towards the use of simple, clear and consistent user interface. The mobile platform is currently the most-favored medium for browsing. The success of a business depends on how to create a site that can display its content similarly on the desktop as well as on the mobile platform without skipping or changing the content of the site.
Responsive designs are the rage nowadays. They happily allow the programmers and the designers to create a uniform layout irrespective of the resolution and nature of the devices out there. The use short animation has increased in the last few years. Scrolling has taken precedence over clicking due to the heavy mobile users in the world.
Several design changes happened since the beginning of the World Wide Web. Many of them enhanced the functionalities while many simply hindered the user experience. Many of the confusing design elements still can be found on the various websites. However, they remain in low numbers due because of the popularity of the flat and simple user interface in the majority of the sites.
In the near future, we will definitely observe many creative as well as eccentric innovations in terms of user interface. The mobile platform will definitely be the torchbearer for the most of the innovation in the imminent future.