In 2016, there were over 3.4 billion internet users worldwide. For most people today, browsing the web is a daily activity.
Over the years, web design has transformed the internet – how we experience it, interact with it, and leverage it in every area of our lives. But when did web design begin and how did we get to where we are today?
We are about to dive deep into the history and evolution of web design and see how web design best practices have changed over the decades.
It all started 30 years ago… in a computer lab far, far away.
The Early Web Design Days
(1991-1994)
The very first website on the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee who designed the website at the Swiss research center, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). You can still access the basic CERN website which was developed for the purpose of distributing information to other researchers.
Not only is Berners-Lee credited as the first web designer, he also created Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), with which he coded the CERN site. He would go on to found the World Wide Web Consortium which still oversees development of web standards today.
In the early web design days, HTML’s <table> function was the only way to organize information by assigning data to columns and rows. No colour blocks, no images, no graphics, just text. A far cry from what we consider “web design” today.
The World Wide Web continued to grow and only 2 years later, the world’s first search engine was born. ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web), was a web page that organized links into the categories of computing, entertainment, living, money, newsstand, recreation, research, and shopping.
ALIWEB also utilized a new form of organization – colour. A yellow background separated the categories and made it easier for users to quickly identify what they were looking for. Like the first website, ALIWEB is still alive today. In fact, clicking the “BMW” link in the Auto category will take you to BMW’s present-day site.
As the number of websites grew, so did the concept of using website design to achieve business goals. Landing pages began to sprout up around 1993, and drew users in with colour and invitations to “Click Here to Enter”, or “Sign Up Now”.
Hotwire (now Wired Magazine) pioneered the first web banner ad in 1994, and had the subtle message of, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will”. Brilliant.
Websites exploded in popularity in the early 90s. One website in 1991. A total of 2,738 in 1994. And for historical context, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com in 1994.
Houston, we have liftoff.
The Evolution of Web Development
(1995-2000)
Once the novelty of simply having a website wore off, it was time to get serious about effective design. The evolution of web design and development that occurred from 1995 to 1998 would drastically change the history of web design.
Enter JavaScript. This is where design began to differentiate from development, as Javascript was the first programming language that could add motion to static websites with interactive effects.
HTML 2.0 was released in 1995, supporting graphics, forms, tables, and more. This gave developers more creative liberties in page organization.
As tools for design and development became more sophisticated, web users began to expect more from their online experiences. As a result, Apple coined the term, “User Experience” at a computer systems conference.
In 1996, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) became available and directed the display and style of HTML coded design elements like colour, layout, and typography. HTML and CSS were a power duo, but CSS would eventually replace HTML tables with the exception of data requiring true tabular layout.
Web animation was next to the stage, and Macromedia Flash 1.0 took the web by storm. But it was not without its faults. Animations could only run if a website was equipped with the Flash plugin extension, otherwise the animation would show up blank. This posed a significant problem for websites built entirely on Flash. In addition, the heavy lifting that was required behind the scenes to bring the animations to life also meant slower page loading.
Downfalls aside, Flash ushered in an era of page improvement through movement. It served the web well and played a significant role in the history of web design. That role, however, came to an end on December 31, 2020, when Adobe ended the support of Flash and Windows removed Flash from all browsers.
In 1998, Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google Beta as part of a research project that explored indexing page results based on relevant search terms. Page and Brin could not have known the magnitude of what they had just created and how Google would influence and change both the internet and web designing.
As Google became a major search engine, the term “Search Engine Optimization” began to be thrown around, and businesses sought ways to improve their rank.
Interestingly, because Flash animation required a plugin extension to work, it was invisible to Google.
Web capability was growing and ecommerce and online payments now allowed businesses to shift analog payment processes to digital. Paypal (which was actually named Confinity for the first two years), launched in 2000 and established itself as a front runner in online transactions.
Online shopping anyone?