The Evolution Of Website Design

By: John Mahoney

Website design is an intricate part of the Internet as it is what constructs its body. From the early days when people barely understand it to the present when HTML and other languages are being taught to people as young as grade school students. While web technology is still evolving as we speak, the foundations of website design and its undeniable importance will never be extinguished.

Basically, website design is the all-important process of conceptualizing, planning, modeling, and creating what is known as the main delivery vessel of media content via the Internet, which takes form due to the use of markup languages and other technologies. The resulting product is then made suitable for conversion and display by a web browser or any other such software.

The delivery of content with website design involves many different implementations like markup languages (HTML, XHTML, XML), plug-ins (Flash, QuickTime Java), and so on. These are used to encode and lay out different forms of media like text, images, videos, Flash, and others into a comprehensible medium for viewing. The web pages that we browse through everyday are all results of website design.

The recent improvements on website design include those of web browsers' compliance with W3C standards, which spurred on the use of XHTML and XML in correlation to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which has revolutionized the customization of web layouts. This and many other improvements have made website design accessible to web users. Nowadays, anyone can be a webmaster with the right tools and the proper knowledge.

There are two types of pages produced by website design: static and dynamic pages. The former don't change form until manually manipulated, which means that they have to be tended to constantly for updates. The latter, however, change form and content according to input and interaction, as well as changes in environment; including that of the user, time, changes in database, and so on. This means that they adapt to input on the client side, bringing in a more user-oriented development of a website. They involve the use of client-side scripting languages like JavaScript, Jscript, Actionscript, and so on. They usually can be seen in forms of server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP, JSP, Python, and so on. They can be seen all over the Internet with different functionalities according to purpose.

It all started with the advent of the mainstream Internet brought on by the pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, who published what was to be known as a website on August 1991. He was the first person to combine what was then the main function of the Internet, which was communication (email, Usenet, BBS), along with hypertext. The latter had been used for quite some time, but was limited to browsing information within a single computer. This was the start of the Hypertext Transfer Markup Language, or HTML, which would then revolutionize how information was distributed, giving birth to what came to be known as the information superhighway and ushering in what is now known as the Internet Age.

Nowadays, website design has become a crucial part of any dedicated computer user's skill set. As the Internet continues evolving, so will the different methods implemented into the creation of web pages, continually shifting the way information is distributed throughout the world.