Website Design-History

Web Design means a range of activities on the Internet, such as planning, creating, modeling, designing, coding, programming and re-programming of websites, which in formal language stands for a professional array of pages which make up a clutter-free and easy-to-handle site. No doubt, it is one of those very important inventions in the history of mankind’s scientific adventures, and has been successful to a great extent.

Website Design forms a very essential part of this elaborate process, known as Web Design. It mainly requires certain markup languages, like HTML for structuring, CSS for presentation and JavaScript for developing pages which can be read by people browsing the Net. The keyword here is “easy-to-use”, and so web-designers over the decades have always tried to make their websites as user friendly as possible.

The history of Website Design is not a very long one. The personal computer first made its appearance in the 1950s. Shortly after, in the 1960s, Internet made its appearance, and it is said that initially, it was used only for the US military purposes. After that, many Universities started using it, and it started developing headily.

The first website was published in the WWW (World Wide Web) format sometime in the August of 1981. Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina designed the Mosaic, a free browser program, which was made available to the public in the 1990s. They originally ran it on UNIX, but later it was made available to other Operating Systems like Mac, Windows and Amiga OS.

Early web-designers, or the First Generation web-designers, used to create only simple layouts, with texts, tables; pages containing no graphic images. With the years, technology developed, and the Second Generation designers took Web Design to a new level. Now the developers started using their own bits of HTML codes, and due to this increased practice, HTML 2 was born. Internet became faster, and Website Design now started requiring more HTML capabilities. Coding became more complicated, and graphics more frequent.

The year 1995 emerged more HTML tags with the birth of HTML 3. Same year, Microsoft’s own browser, Internet Explorer was released. Graphics became more frequent, and websites more beautiful. With the advent of .gif, animated contents started making their presence felt on the websites. The introduction of Flash proved to be a further breath of fresh air. Web Design reached a totally new level, and its whole landscape underwent a complete metamorphosis.

Nowadays, the websites that we see belong to the Fourth Generation. Apart from HTML, new coding tools like JavaScript, Flash, CSS and XML etc. are also available. HTML 5 is the current version of HTML in use.

The websites, in today’s date, are mainly created to meet the need the of the urban market, with people becoming more interested in ecommerce, education, business etc., and particularly designed to meet the requirements of their clients. The WWW continues to grow, with the number of its users growing every day.

The history of Web Design is essentially the history of the 21st century, and we all should be aware that, being a part of the 21st century ourselves, we can all make a major contribution to its further development.