In the early 1990s, websites were text-based. The use of images and graphics were not yet main stream at the time. The initial web design was made of a single column and text-based pages in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Website pages were an accumulation text documents connected together by internal links. Through research and development, significant advancements were made. The initial website was published in 1991 by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He is also the present director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded in 1994, which oversees the web development and its standards.
In the mid 1990s, table-based websites were introduced. Now web designers could organize their webpages within cells of a table. It became possible to generate multiple column websites, which in exchange allowed better site content organization and navigation layout. Table-based websites also enabled customization of each element within the table. Web site designers could now insert background images within cells of a desk; however, good design principles were not really important. Website designers and clients were interested by the greatest, latest and innovative web design technology available. As things started initially to evolve, frames, animated texts and visual hit counters became section of Webdesign. Frames were used to clearly separate the body of a web site from the sidebar navigation. Animated texts and GIF images were used to recapture the website user's attention, while visual hit counters became a good way to assess the popularity of a webpage. In 1994, Macromedia introduced Flash, that will be essentially a pc software used to create Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to generate animations and stream videos.
In the late 1990s, Flash became more popular. Most websites became a variety of table-based design and flash elements, with flash animations including the business's logo, a flash-based navigation and flash-based image galleries. The major Web Design innovation of the late 1990s was the introduction of Personal Home Page (PHP) which based on Wikipedia, is really a server-side scripting language made for web development. PHP gained a lot of popularity because it's free and appropriate for leading os's and web servers which make it deployment easy across different platforms.
The 21st century brought a lot of innovation to web design with the introduction of CSS. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a mode sheet language used to format an HTML webpage. Now web designers could separate the information of a full page (HTML) from its styling or design (layout, colors, fonts, etc.). In the early 2000s, Microsoft Internet Explorer became the first browser to completely support the CSS structure. In stride, the thought of intelligent web was introduced with the advent of JavaScript. Now designers could animate content without flash and perform a complex computation of data. The use of drop-down menus and forms also became very popular. These forms allowed internet users to generate content online, create personal profiles and upload pictures.
In the mid 2000s, the semantic web was born. This movement primary allows machines and computers to comprehend website pages as well as human do. This is made possible by inserting computer readable Meta tags about pages and their relation together through technologies such as for example XML, TURTLE and N-TRIPLES.
The last decade was marked by the advent of web 2.0 with some major updates. The web became more and more interactive, and web applications began to expand. Now site content can refresh itself with no the whole page reloaded. The attention is currently geared toward site content (articles, Press Releases, graphics and videos) rather than selling products online. And HTML 5 was introduced instead to Flash and graphics.
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