Happy 25th Birthday to The Internet

Considering I moved from print design to creating websites in 1994, the same year that Web surfing was born, and a whole year before Google and Internet Explorer were competing for our attention, I feel we have grown and evolved together.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, having a website for your business meant you were very adventurous, and your main target audience was the computer geek. Convincing companies other than the Pizza delivery and Porn industry that having a website would be good for business was almost impossible. Not to mention the design restrictions that were in place, some due to intensive coding, others due to very slow dialup internet connections.

As a designer you really had to think outside the box to be able to achieve a "style" that didn't look like a programmer had put the website together at 2am in the morning. (Which was often the case, as web pages needed to be coded by hand.)

As the years progressed, Windows 3.11 gave way to a more user friendly Windows 95, dialup internet increased speed to 56k, and in 1990 the first markup language is launched, providing everyone with a computer, the ability to create their own website. But websites were still very restricted, as one of the most important aspects of design was missing... the table (introduced in 1992). So all pages were centered and in one long column.

By 1994, there were over 600 websites online, so the World Wide Web Consortium was established to set goals and standards for the future of design, paving the way for Flash and Javascript to bring simple animation to browsers (predominately Microsoft Explorer) in 1996 and also the introduction of frames.

By the late 90s, there were now over 650 THOUSAND websites to look at, and some of them were starting to look pretty nice, although most weren't interactive at all. It was just too difficult and expensive to hire a programmer to even create something as simple as a contact us form.

That is until the end of the 90s, with the demand of over 2.2 MILLION websites, PHP was introduced, followed up not long after by CSS3 and ASPX, starting the beginning of truly dynamic web pages. And with broadband being introduced into many houses, designers stepped up to make exciting and inspirational as well as extremely useful websites. Businesses started to be aware that if they didn't have a website they would be left behind. Online shopping was becoming more popular and 1000s of search engines were all competing for our attention, making SEO a nightmare.

By 2003 with over 782 Million users online and 38 million websites, the web continued to evolve, introducing the user-based social media, wiki and blog sites. At first these were purely for university students, allowing a great way to share information and ask questions. But it wasn't long before business realised that their target audience was spending more time on the social sites instead of searching websites, and with the introduction of mobile web through smart phones around 2008, business started to rethink the priority of a website, preferring to spread their marketing dollar across the board and reach out through social media channels.

Today in 2014, it's more common for the user to view a website through their smart phone or tablet than on a desktop computer, making it very important that your website is smart phone compatible.

It's now more likely for a business to have several social media channels reaching out to their audiences, making it imperative that someone reliable posting and monitoring on your behalf.

A company is more likely to spend the majority of their advertising dollar on dynamic advertising than print media, making it all the more important to know that your dollar is directed at the right audience, and sending the correct message.

The World Wide Web has evolved so much in the last 25 years, that I'm sure if we look back in time, we'd laugh at the websites we thought were so cutting edge. I know I do. So I've included a couple of my very early designs for your entertainment.

Author: Andy Kahle


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