Last Updated on April 1, 2018 by WebsiteDesigner.sg
Change and evolution are two things that are unswervingly happening in the universe. Evolution promotes creativity by introducing new ideas and better ways to perform tasks. In this article you will read about how web design has evolved over a period of two decades since it was first created.
The first web page was created in 1991. It was nothing like the webpages that exist in modern day world. It was a simple page that contained texts and links. By 1994, the most advanced pages of that time at most, included low-resolution images and GIFs. The reason that these pages were so basic, low end and with almost some or no design is because at that time the most common way to get access to the internet was through Dial-up modems. Dial up modems offered very low speed and premature connectivity. It was pointless to even think about designing webpages as it would put a lot of load that would take ages for the dial-up to process. These websites were hard to navigate, didn’t contain graphic content, no design and transmitted a delayed response. These were very basic HTML containing tags, paragraphs and links.
While more advanced version of HTML was available, complex sites weren’t created because of the low speed internet that existed at that time. With the passage of time as the internet speed evolved, web designing also followed.
By the late 90’s, Designers were starting to organize their content by using tables, categories, columns and rows. Graphical design elements also started to gain attention and were being used in some high-end websites. Small scale animations, use of banners, coloured fonts and gifs etc. The major leap in terms of web design occurred with the release of Flash.
The use of Flash brought a lot of enhancement and new features to the table for web designs. Using neon colors, 3D text, 3D animations, 3D buttons, better navigation etc. With the release of flash, responsiveness, structure and navigation, the look of the webpages became important considerations as these gathered more audiences and were capable of managing a lot of content in a relatively low time.
The use of flash created more room for creativity but at the same time it had some draw backs. It was very time consuming, hard to create graphic elements and then incorporate them into your HTML. Usability and accessibility was also affected. It limited speed and interfered with the bandwidth. Moreover it required an additional plugin for the users to successfully view sites with the graphic content and the frequent crashing also occurred.
With the 2000’s, there was improved and critical support for CSS. Like flash, It didn’t require an extra plugin. It saved the time by decreasing the amount of code which could be used within the HTML document and edited at any time. Moreover, CSS brought complex and more accurate graphic elements for web design. With CSS, every element in your HTML could be graphically designed. It brought a lot of flexibility and creativity along with saving time and resolving all the issues that were there with Flash. Moreover, the introduction of JavaScript and PHP created countless advancements in the modern-day web designing. What started off as something that was that most people didn’t care about, now is the most essential part of how you look at something. Schools, Colleges, Businesses, Tech companies etc, all of them use websites to put their information and products into the global market and the design and format of the webpage is now the key part in marketing their interests.
Web design is a field that is constantly evolving. Now with the use of various advanced components like HTML 5, JavaScript, PHP, CSS3 it has expanded to new boundaries. There is a lot of new creative space and flexibility for a freelance web designer singapore. It would be wrong to set a limit to the possibilities of advancements in this field.