Web design has changed a lot in the last few decades. The internet as we know it (more or less) has been around since the late 1980s, after all and a lot of trends and a lot of technology has come and gone since then. We’ve gone from an internet which was made up of all text websites accessed via text only browsers to overdone sites with frames and tables all over the place and difficult to read rainbow-colored text to the clean, modern look of blogging platforms and other Web 2.0 media.
As anyone old enough to remember the days of 28.8 K modems probably remembers, the majority of websites at one time were text only with very little in the way of design, if any at all. Not only was there no graphics (those wouldn’t come along for a little while yet), there was really not a lot of attention paid to typography either, despite that at the time, the internet was a text only medium which many users thought of as essentially an extension of print media.
Not only was the technology not really in place for the kind of web design we take for granted nowadays in the early days of the World Wide Web, the people building sites were, by and large, programmers, not designers. Of course, when all websites were text only the distinction was a little less clear – but before long, web browsers advanced to the point where they could render more complex designs. Unfortunately, this meant that web users were often greeted by garish multicolored text and flashing text which was hard on the eyes, to say the least.
Once the capabilities of HTML grew to include tables, web design began to get more complicated. While it’s not something anyone would bat an eye over these days, the use of tables made it easier to incorporate graphics into websites and may have helped drive the adoption, if not necessarily the development of faster modems. These new more sophisticated web pages took longer to load, prompting many consumers to upgrade their modems and later on, their internet service itself. Web users took to more intricately designed pages and animated content at first, though most burned out on both after a few years.
Frames were another method of formatting websites which were common around the same time, though they have largely fallen out of favor since the days of Netscape 4 and dial-up internet service. Flash came along and while it is less popular than it once was (many of you reading this may recall the explosion of Flash-based sites around 1999-2000, for instance).
Flash has its opponents and adherents to this day, but it’s inarguable that you don’t see it as much as you used to. It’s notoriously poor as far as search engine optimization is concerned, since search engines can’t index Flash content. Essentially, it hides the content, keeping it from being indexed and thus, from showing up in search engine results – which is why you probably haven’t seen a website which is entirely in Flash for some time.
Of course, there was one positive to the days when Flash based sites and sites with eye-straining colors and graphics ruled the web; it got people interested in web design. More to the point, it got people interested in designing web pages which looked better than the kind of sites they were seeing at the time.
Lately, the trends have been going towards simpler design, which is actually one of the ideas of Web 2.0. Simple, clean design and easy to read typography and overall user friendliness is the name of the game – and like the dawn of the internet, the focus is now on content more than on design.
After years of overdone frame and table based design, infatuation with Flash and other animation on websites, blinking banner ads and other largely bygone web design trends, web designers and web users alike are now realizing that it’s what you say, not how you say it that really matters. While it’s impossible to say with certainty what the future holds for web design, it is safe to say that at least for the immediate future, it seems likely that the focus of web users will remain on quality content, which is the only constant throughout the history of the World Wide Web.