Web Design in the 21st Century

Web design has come a long way since its inceptionand designers merged together in symbiotic splendor
in the early nineties. It has been a long, eventfulto create tools and scripts that displayed websites in
journey to get where it is today. In fact the wholeunimaginable ways. From navigation, to analogue
story of web design has been about people power,clocks and countless other widgets and coding,
demand and ingenuity that is probably beyondJavaScript injected a surge of excitement and
compare in the whole of human history.glamour into our web designs.
From the very beginning when html tables wereThen along came the real star of the show, Flash.
invented to display numerical and mathematical data,Flash media has the capabilities to wow us beyond all
web designers were hacking and distorting the codereasonable expectations. It took a long time to come
to create something that would be pleasing on theto the forefront, as the power of Flash is way
eye. Tables were never meant to contain images andbeyond what dial up Internet connections could
display layouts, but the ingenuity of web designersafford us. It took fibre optics and broadband
produced some beautiful looking designs from theseconnections to deliver us the full potential of Flash.
most basic of building materials.Now here we are in the 21st century, with 50Mb, and
Then came the day when web design really openedeven 100Mb Internet connections (and rising fast),
up with the development of CSS. CSS was aand Flash is about to deliver us to the Promised Land.
godsend to web designers and allowed ways toWeb design has entered a whole new era, and
design far beyond the constraints of html tables.websites are now, and soon to be even more, truly
Separate CSS style sheets were introduced to makeamazing. Flash video has pushed the envelope even
site wide design changes a breeze. Search enginesfurther and soon we can expect not just websites,
became quicker as code become cleaner and webbut mini TV shows delivered to us via our web
design entered a new golden age.browsers. Speech recognition, glorious animation and
Of course web designers are never content withhigh definition video mean exciting times are ahead
what they have. They need to continuously push thefor web design in the 21st century. Compare the
boundaries and evolve. Maybe this is a credit to theearly days of Hollywood and the silent movies to the
amount of competition there is in the web designTechnicolor wet dream of the Star Wars trilogy and
industry. Always needing to keep one up on theyou might get an idea of where the Web is heading.
competition pushes humans to find new andStrap yourselves in, make yourselves comfortable,
innovative ways to develop and grow.share a big bag of popcorn, and prepare to be
JavaScript was the next star to shine in this unfoldingamazed!
theatre we call the World Wide Web. ProgrammersThank you for reading.