A Brief History of Web Design

With the explosion of the Internet's popularity since its inception, going from an amusing novelty a few decades ago to now becoming a necessary, integral part of human life, having a website and an online presence has become an absolute requirement for all businesses — from Fortune 500 corporations to sole proprietorships and singular online personalities like YouTubers and Twitch streamers.

As such, many different ways of creating websites have been developed over the years. Websites weren't even first thought of as websites initially, instead they were considered to be more like documents, almost like you would expect a Word document or a PDF to be shared via Office 365 today. Therefore the first websites were very rudimentary, using the first iterations of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) with very simple black text on white backgrounds, and the occasional hyperlink to take the user to different yet related pages/documents. Styling websites with colors, menus, animations, and other visual designs didn't even come around until several years later with the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Since those times, the Internet has obviously become a much more visually vibrant and aesthetically appealing place. Web design has come a long way from considering web pages to be merely "documents", and instead many of them now function as full-fledged applications accessible from a variety of devices, be it desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile. As more and more people wanted to explore the possibilities of creating their own websites, web developers started developing tools to make it easier for the average person to design their own websites without necessarily having to be experts in coding.

The first iterations were services like GeoCities and AngelFire. In fact, many younger kids who would one day grow up to be web developers started learning the basics of HTML using these websites. We look back on these services with an amused nostalgia nowadays, noting the vast aesthetic differences between them and modern web design; but make no mistake, these services like GeoCities and AngelFire (and their competitors) were an important stepping stone on the road to the modern web development that we know today.

Services still exist today to help the non-technical or less-technical crowd build their own websites, and the capabilities of these types of tools are better than they've ever been. If you've attempted to do your own research in the process of figuring out how to make your own website, you've probably come across tools like WordPress, Wix, and SquareSpace. In fact, many domain registrars like GoDaddy also have their own in-house website builder tools that you can purchase access to. These tools can be great for familiarizing oneself with web design and development, and can even produce viable websites for small projects and websites that don't receive a lot of traffic. However, like everything else in life, that convenience and ease of use comes at a cost; namely, performance.

What do you mean by "hand-written" code?

The aforementioned trade-offs for using easy-to-use website builders aimed at the non-developer audience all come down to one key aspect: performance. Not only does your website have to run its own code, but it also has to run the code that allows the website builders to work. Oftentimes this can result in significantly slowed loading speeds on your website, which in today's times can be a real site killer. When you get into the world of WordPress, for example, and begin installing various plugins for different website functionality, the catch is that the more plugins you install, the slower your site will run.

Research has shown that given modern-day internet speeds, if a website takes more than 3 seconds max to load, users will assume that there is some sort of problem with the site, and they will either try to close and re-open it, or close it out entirely and move on to a different website. For the business owner that wants to convert website visitors to paying customers, this is obviously quite detrimental.

Google also ranks search results based on it's PageSpeed Insights service, which measures the speed of a given website against a variety of factors and metrics. The higher the PageSpeed score your website gets, the higher it will appear in Google search results when potential customers are searching for your business.

This is why at Palm Grove Web Design, we take the "hand-written code" approach. HTML and CSS have come a long way since the early days in the 90's, and much of the functionality that used to require third-party modules and libraries are now built-in to HTML and CSS directly. Combined with the ubiquitous web programming language JavaScript, it becomes possible to build sleek, modern websites that are visually appealing to the modern user, load nearly instantly, and achieve high rankings in Google searches without the technical overhead and resulting performance degradation that comes with using site builders like WordPress, Wix, and SquareSpace.

Of course, the trade-off there is that this requires more technical in-depth knowledge; but that's what makes our services valuable to you as a business owner. You can delegate and outsource the technical details to us, so you can focus your time and energy on building your business and expanding your customer base.