These days we expect every website we visit to be elegant, easy to use and informative. We are used to clever graphics and beautiful images and can be harsh when it But when the web began websites looked a little different. In this post I will look into how websites has changed and improved over the years and what we expect from sites these days.
The birth of the web
The internet began in the 1950’s and the first electronic message was sent in the 1960’s. By the 80’s the ‘Internet Protocol Suite’ or TCP/IP has been written and gave people guidelines on what data they could send and receive on the internet. Then in the 90’s the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee and the world saw their first web page!
In the beginning websites looked very different to the sites of today. In the 1990’s, Tim Berners-Lee’s first site contained purely text and no images at all.
Soon simple images could be included and text effects like coloured or moving text could be added to your website.
Yahoo’s 1996
Beginning to grow
During the noughties CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) began to become more popular. It allowed you to change many more features and aspects of your website by using code. This meant the background colour, text style or size could be altered and applied to your whole site and not just one page.
BBC 2000
Javascript then began to change websites even more. It let you add a drop down menu to your site, improve your navigation and create a more creative looking website.
BBC 2008
All grown up!
Today there are hundreds of ways of changing and improving your site! Websites are no longer text only, now you could have a full screen photo page, no text included!
Spotify today
Sites these days not only have to worry about how they look on your computer screen, but also on tablets and phones. We all expect sites to work on all devices and to display well on whatever screen we are using, definitely not something the first designers had to worry about!
There are so many designs, styles and effects possible on the internet these days that websites are able to look pretty much however you want them to. This means there are a lot more options when it comes to designing your website today but it also means your site is expected to look impressive. You can’t get away with the simple text displays of the 90’s today!
Here at Kimberley Jane Design we use WordPress to create sleek and simple websites with style. We have created many different designs, for many different businesses, take a look and see how our website designs compare to those shown here!
