Evolution of Web Design- By: Nick Thomas

Description :
The World Wide Web, commonly known as WWW, which came into existence in 1991 has seen a series of changes due to advancements in web technologies. In a span of just 20 years, web design is nothing like it was back in the day.

The first website created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 was a single column text-based site made in HTML. In those days, websites appeared like text based documents on top of each other strung together by links. Simple HTML tags were used at that time. By the mid 1990s, tables were introduced in sites for better content organization and navigation. Animated text and gif images started being used to make websites more attractive. Visit counters at the end of a page were added for the first time. Flash was also introduced.

The late 1990s saw a sudden rise of flash being used in the web development process. Company web sites now showed logos bouncing around and navigation became click dependent. On the whole, websites became a combination of table-based and flash elements. There was still a need to make sites more user-friendly and based on user interaction. This led to the introduction of the first language which could produce dynamic web pages known as PHP. The fact that it could be embedded into an HTML source document aided to its popularity and wide usage.

The next notable advancement in website design and development was the introduction of Cascade Style Sheets (CSS) which greatly eased out the development process. CSS enabled the content of a web page to get separated from its presentation and layout. Though it was launched in 1998, its potential was realized a few years later. Soon after in the early 2000s, came the first successful attempt at adding intelligence to the web in the form of another scripting language called JavaScript.

Towards the end of 2000s, web design became more application based and involved more human interaction. The use of asynchronous JavaScript and XML enabled smooth transitions during navigation. For the first time you could notice changes in a web page without refreshing it. Websites became more multimedia based as audio and video embedment became a mainstream. Flash, due to its heavy structure and inability to be read by search engines lost its importance and was replaced my HTML 5. Rich internet applications, which require fast internet speeds, also became widely used.

Today's scenario is quite different. The internet is shifting to mobile phones with many software development companies understanding the importance of mobile websites. Quick, simple and informative versions of the usual websites are being built by web designers and developers catering to the mobile computing community.

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Author Resource : Kevin James is the author of this article. He has been writing articles for many software development companies like offshore software development. Moreover, he has been actively involved in writing content for cloud computing strategy.