|
Design © Astra Design Company
|
History of Web DesignThe term web design means the process of web site creation, including planning, modeling, designing and arrangement of web pages which make up a web site. The main aim of web design is to create a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate web site devoted to a specific subject area and suitable for interpretation and displaying by a web browser in the Internet. 
As the Internet has become popular and widely used by the overwhelming majority of people in not too many years ago, web design does not have a long history. It is still a new and developing area of activity which combines multiple disciplines of information technologies with communication design. In the late 1960s, the Internet served as a means of communication between computers for the sole purpose of exchanging important data using transmission control protocols (TCP/IP). Though the service was primarily developed for US military needs, with time some universities began to use it. The year of 1969 was marked by the creation of ARPANET and GML (General Markup Language), and the process of development of what is known today as the Internet began. In 1972, Ray Tomlinson invented email that essentially changed the way of communication through the Internet. In 1980, a working draft of Standard GML (SGML) was announced by American National Standards Institute committee, and a few years later, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). HTML was a simple markup language and enabled web sites to have some structure elements such as, for example, headings, and link to other sites using hypertext. In 1989-1990, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a set of protocols and software (the first web browser and editor called World Wide Web) that allowed computers to browse the information in the Internet and developed the first web server called HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon (httpd). He was the first to combine the Internet communication with hypertext and was also responsible for the first web site which was put online in August 1991. At that time there was only one web server located in CERN, but by the end of 1992, over 50 web servers were operating in the world, primarily at the universities and research centers. 
In the beginning, web design was of the minimum, but as the Web progressed, HTML became more complex and flexible allowing users to add images and tables to web pages. With the invention of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and a web server technology with the ability to highly customize the response based on the user's requirements (server-side scripting), web design experienced a rapid evolution. In 1993, the first Internet browser, Mosaic - which enabled users to surf the Internet in a graphical way and opened the Web up to the general public - was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The browser made it possible for users to view text and graphic, but within a very limited layout arrangement that influenced the ability to provide graphic design information for visual communication and restricted the abilities of web design. In 1994, W3C Consortium was founded in order to set standards and direction of future development of HTML to achieve an ability to provide dynamic content over the web. And soon after, in 1995, Microsoft released a new version of the company’s operating system, Windows 95, which featured a completely new user interface and a browser on the Windows platform, Microsoft Internet Explorer, which became very popular worldwide. A few months later, AltaVista, the first multi-lingual search engine, and Amazon.com, one of the first Internet companies to allow electronic transactions, were invented, and the World Wide Web began to grow rapidly. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting (PHP, ASP.Net, JSP, ColdFusion, etc.) and design standards like CSS were substantially changed and provided more opportunities for web designers and web developers. With the introduction of Macromedia Flash in 1996, the technology became a popular method used to create animation, various web page components and integrate video into web pages, and further changed the face of the Internet. Though Flash enabled designers to create interactive content with minimal development knowledge, its early versions had very limited scripting capability. But in the following years Flash continued to develop, gaining a scripting language based on JavaScript and other useful features that transformed it into a full presentation development tool. And nowadays there are many web sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash ignoring the fact that multiple flash elements decelerate load time. History of web design is inconceivable without a person who has contributed much in its development and is considered to be a leading web usability consultant. His name is Jakob Nielsen. Dr. Nielsen has a computer science PhD and is very popular among web designers and web developers. His column devoted to web usability has been published in the Internet since 1995 and currently numbers more than 200,000 readers. Being called “the king of usability” (Internet Magazine) and “the guru of web page usability” (The New York Times), Jakob Nielsen has developed the main principles which make a site easy to use. He criticizes Flash, animation and large graphics and gives preferences to plain, easy-to-navigate web sites accessible to a common user of the Internet. Though Nielsen is often denounced for radical views and emphatic remarks, his teachings have gained popularity with the wider design community. History of web design can be conventionally divided into four main periods (generations) subject to the level of web site development and the complexity of site design. The first period began with the development of the first freeware browser “Mosaic” and came to the end when HTML became widespread. The design of web sites at that stage was influenced much by many technological restrictions such as slow modem connections, inability of service providers to transfer the data quickly and monochrome monitors. The websites of that time usually included headline banners and a full-page text with black lines for segmentations. In contrast to sites of the first period the websites of the second period looked more professional and had some new characteristics, including icons instead of words, buttons with chamfered edges, banners, structural menu to present a hierarchy of information and bullets. The web sites created at this stage were over-crowded with icons, colored graphics and backgrounds. Many of the site characteristics were driven by the development of technology that was constantly changing, for example, there was need to adapt site design to the certain screen resolution and to 8bit or 24bit monitors. At that time web designers began to pay attention to such a significant factor as speed of downloading information. But still web text was not easy to read because of the browser characteristics, and users were not interested in waiting a few minutes for a content to appear on the screen. Third generation web sites were developed with the main purpose to deliver the multi-media content, including sound, animation, 3D models, etc., that was in demand. This stage is associated with the introducing of Flash technology which has become very popular. Web designers used multi-media content with the aim to attract customers and visitors in accordance with the particular site's objective. Therefore, the site structure and its navigation system were considered extremely important for the site design in order to enable users to find what they are looking for quickly. The main principle of the third stage was to follow the strategy of “AIDA”, i.e., attract new visitors, hold their interest to a site for a while, arouse the desire to learn more about a site or a company, and motivate visitors to take action to respond. The fourth generation web sites tend to be similar to the sites of the previous generation with some distinctive features such as an abundance of multi-media content and unique web–driven selling propositions which can only be delivered on the Internet. Nowadays, websites are specifically developed for ecommerce, government, education, entertainment, business, etc. with the main purpose to meet the client’s requirements. 
The World Wide Web continues to grow together with the number of web users and every year millions of web sites are added to the mix. The main trends and techniques of web design change in accordance with the technological expansion and the requirements of the Internet users giving place to such factors as creativity and adequacy. History of web design is a history of the 21st century; therefore each of us has a unique opportunity to contribute to its further development. References:
|
