Designing a website requires a different approach than before, but even as it does, there are definite patterns that are repeating. In this post I’m going to talk about how Web Design has evolved, and how current trends are bringing the design to a whole new level of simplicity and precision.
Over the years web design has gone from creating graphics to images, to vector graphics. It’s not just drawing or painting anymore; you can easily convert a sketch or a random illustration into a vector shape, add some subtle colour or sharpen a graphic by manually dragging shapes.
In the early 2000s we got close to the real definition of the Internet, with social media websites like Facebook and Twitter that allowed anyone to share anything online, and grew faster than ever before.
The early 2000s were pretty wild in terms of web design. The biggest sites were still far from being completely ready. Websites were very basic, but we were still getting used to such a complex thing as a virtual web. For us web designers it was an incredible new technology that allowed us to quickly create a website by simply opening a graphic editor, or using the HTML and CSS codes in it, then uploading it to a web server.
Websites were still using the usual HTML and CSS codes, then we started to switch to the new CSS3. Still everything was about functionality. You could use the HTML codes and CSS only to do simple graphics or images. There was still a lot of limitations and things you couldn’t do, and some websites were really hard to make.
Over time we started to switch to more flexible technologies, and we started creating websites with fancy images and colourful designs that also used graphics. There were still limitations in terms of bandwidth, for example if you use really large images you might need a much bigger server. Some websites weren’t optimized for bigger bandwidth, and if they were that might slow down their performance, or make them appear a bit less pleasant.
A year or so ago we saw websites that allowed you to customize their colour scheme for different operating systems and web browsers, and make websites that displayed in all kinds of different colours.
The big breakthrough in web design came when websites started to use Javascript. It wasn’t just about JavaScript coding; Javascript allowed websites to display colour, images, videos, and interactive widgets on any website.
But the biggest breakthrough that we saw in web design was Web Design Canvas. It was the breakthrough that made everything we ever dreamed of.
Last year, as I was researching what new websites are using Web Design Canvas and which modern web browsers support it, I also discovered that Web Design Canvas allows you to draw a background image for any web page you create.
You can either upload an image, or just create a layer that holds an image. You can add your own text to the layer, choose a colour for it, and then apply the background image to it by dragging it around.
Unless you’re in the business yourself, all of these technical details are interesting to read about, but the actual work is best left to the professionals. After all, it’s the results in the performance of the final output that make a certain agency you’d want to work with the best Digital Marketing Agency Liverpool has to offer.
