Web Design

How web pages look has changed enormously since the World Wide Web’s inception in 1989. Way back then the nascent web was all about making information more easily available and share amongst people be they in the next room or on the other side of the world. The format this information took was just plain old text. This was fine for the people using the web in those early days because they were nearly all academics and scientists. They were not interested in having pretty pictures and intense graphics to distinguish between different pages.

As the web broke out of its academic ghetto and people without a scientific background started to use it, they wanted to make things look a bit better than just a page of text. The problem was that the way web pages were put together did not allow for the inclusion of pictures. This soon changed and people could add pictures to illustrate what they wrote.

This was a big stride forward, but as with all these things, once it is seen that things can better, there is a demand for things to get even better again. Now that people could add pictures they wanted more control over how to arrange the page. They wanted ways to design their web page. They wanted two-columns of text. They wanted three columns of text. They wanted the text to wrap around their newly inserted pictures. They wanted to add colour to their web pages. The profession of Web Design was born.