Web Design History

In the boom of the nineties ridiculous sums of money exchanged hands for the construction of Web Sites. Many of these Web Site owners thought a web site would offer instant results. It became clear, very soon, that often these web sites offered nothing to visitors and very little to the owners, other than the opportunity to add the web address to their stationary.

The initial excitement and expectation of dropping a Web Site into the World Wide Web and sitting back to watch the money fly in, very quickly lead to major disappointment and a hole in the pocket.

Technology has moved on and in some ways come full circle. Web sites started as plain text offering information on many subjects, but had little functionality. Soon image driven sites with graphic animation and complex graphic designs took hold. They looked great, for a while, but were largely invisible to search engines, took forever to load, became tiresome to use and were in no way accessible to every user. With billions of web pages to choose from, web sites today need to be effective, informative, eye catching and comply with certain rules or guidelines to provide users an interface that's easy to navigate and familiar.

Complex business systems can now be provided online, however the text content of any web site is still very important to make sure that the web site is found by the target audience or market. Flash animation started as a useful powerful way to animate advertisements and was quickly developed to be used in producing complete websites. These websites were initially exciting to look at and use but it became apparent quite quickly that search engines could not read the content which often lead to the failure of these flash sites.

Today text in a flash site can be read by some search engines but personally and generally designers stay away from completely constructing a site using flash. As flash has developed with the ability to write code to program complex features into a flash animation also in conjunction with Ajax and Flex it has now become a useful tool for creating online games, online editing systems and user interfaces that can interact with the servers seamlessly. So there are now more reasons than just animated banners to use flash in websites.

With the huge increase in online shopping where today many people do all their shopping online, even groceries, it has become vital that websites stick to a familiar format where navigation design is not vastly outside of the majority of sites. Website users are generally impatient and expect a website to load quickly and from there be able to find what they are looking for without fuss and distraction. If they can't then they go somewhere else and don't return.

When it comes to buying online again people want to complete this including the payment with the minimum of time and fuss. Payment providers like PayPal and Google checkout have enabled smaller companies to start online stores avoiding large monthly payment for merchant facilities and allowing their business to grow slowly without massive initial investment. Paying using these payment providers is often quicker for the user than conventional payment systems like World Pay so many sites now offer several different ways to pay online.

Most importantly any web site needs work and have a fighting chance of being found when searched for. This is only achieved through careful professional web design and a solid marketing plan.