Just a few days ago, we celebrated the 20th birthday of the Internet, or as we fondly call it, “The World Wide Web”. When we reminisce about the past 20 years, we feel amazed at how the Internet has changed our lifestyles.
Most industries these days are very fast moving, and this holds especially true for anything related to Information Technology. If one fails to keep up to date about the latest developments in their specific field, they will be left behind and have a very difficult time catching up.
A lot has changed about the Internet, but here, we specifically wanted to discuss the changes in design on the World Wide Web. Let us take a brief look at the history of web page designs and then we can discuss the major topic of Responsive Web Designs, the latest advancement in the web design field.
History:
- Early 1990’s: Single column, text based pages built in HTML. Websites looked like documents.
- Mid 1990’s: Table-based sites were introduced. Allowed displaying the content in navigation layout. In this era,
- Frame pages became popular to differentiate the body of the website and the navigation menu.
- Visual counters for number of visitors were displayed at the bottom of the website.
- Animated text and GIF images also gained popularity.
- Animated text and GIF images also gained popularity.
- Late 1990′: Websites were a combination of table based designs and flash elements.
- Company logos kept bouncing around on the homepage of many websites.
- Flash based navigation gained popularity, which expanded and changed color when clicked on it.
- PHP gained a lot of popularity for dynamically generated content.
- Early 2000′: CSS gained popularity. It provided a lot of comfort to the designers:
- Cascading Styles, allowed the designers to separate website content from the design.
- Designers were able to define background color, text size etc. using the CSS, instead in the HTML of the page itself
- Mid 2000’s: JavaScript gained popularity. Designers started using JavaScript for the website page layout. Designers were able to animate menus without Flash, compute data, and much more using JavaScript.
- Navigation bars started to move on the top of the page.
- Drop down menus became popular for navigation.
- Users were able to create their own customized profiles with photos.
- Semantic web gained popularity; it was aimed to allow the machined to understand web pages.
- Late 2000’s: Web 2.0 gained popularity for designers. The website was designed with more interactive content. Designers started using asynchronous JavaScript and XML for smooth content transition. The major advancement in this era was HTML5, it was treated as an alternative to Flash.
Website designs in its last 2 decades have seen a number of changes. Designers were always on the edge of their seat in order t keep up with the latest trends in designing industry.
Present Day:
Here we are in the age of multiple devices. Nowadays, many people access websites from multiple devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. With the smartphones available in the market and the tablets capturing a healthy percentage of market, the designs of websites need to also change to accommodate the sizes of these gadgets.
Most of the companies have already built the mobile versions of their websites. The companies that have not done so have changed the layouts making the website tall and skinny rather than the previous trends of short and wide designs.
Responsive Web Designs:
Now, we see a new trend emerging called Responsive web design. Such designs adjust themselves according to the size of the screen without hampering the look and feel of the website for the user. The responsive web designs adapt their layout and design according to the size of the screen displaying it. With the help of responsive web designs, designers are now able to make websites for any screen size and feel confident that the viewer gets an optimal experience. Responsive web design has 3 major parts on which a designer needs to work with: Fluid Grid, Fluid Images, and Media Queries.
As it gains popularity, more designers will find themselves learning this new technique in designing, as it is the requirement of current times due to more and more people are using smart phones and tablets for browsing on the internet. Responsive web design would not be the last change designers will see; this is an industry where changes are inevitable.
We leave you with a quote about change and some great examples of Responsive Web Designs we came across on the web:
“The only constant thing is the world is change”.
