The Evolution Of Web Design

The definitions of "web" and "design" have both been somewhat elastic in the last decade or two as both technology and user expectations have evolved. Some of the evolution is the slow, gradual kind you don't notice until you turn around a week, month or year later and go, "Wow, when did that happen?" Other times, you can almost watch it in real time, as in 2002 and 2003 when the web began a quick stretch from personal computers to TVs, cell phones, media players and even refrigerators (an "ice" idea that got a cool reception).

For non-technical culture-watchers, it was another evolving "gee-whiz kind of thing," but for web professionals it was a phase of growth called "the ubiquitous web." It leveraged some basic XML capabilities to spread the virtual goodies around a bit more widely, but really was merely evolutionary, not revolutionary, as the marketing departments would describe it. One thing any careful observer would (and did) note was that it put new demands on the web designer. A nice layout with a few hyperlinks was not going to do it any longer.

More and more demands

Fast-forward a few years, into 2005 or 2006, and we enter the era of "service oriented architecture" and other, similar buzzwords. The boundaries were extended, followed by a ramping up of expectations and then the arrival of "loosely coupled services" and another set of evolutionary ideas. Over the last three or four years this model has been refined and revised, but we are still in the era of "customer-centric web design."

The term pretty much defines itself, or it should, at any rate. Without trying to pin down the years too precisely, or make the model seem hard and fast, the evolution of web design can also be plotted along a path that has led inexorably from a focus on the companies and their sites to the customers who are visiting them. The progression went something like this:Company-centric sites: The first web design model has been called "brochureware," since the first websites in the early- and mid-1990s were essentially marketing materials on your screen. The design effort was sometimes reduced to scanning sell sheets and sticking them on a page with some links.

Designer-centric (or ego-centric) sites: Once the tools became available to use the web as a canvas, the artists went hog-wild and "gussied up" cyberspace to an incredible degree. Like the early desktop publishing era, there were a few years of wretched excess before the overdoses tapered off. There is still some of this going on (actually, there are still brochureware sites, too) but it's fast dying off.

Technology-centric sites: When a new generation of tools took the designer past the canvas metaphor to the "whiz-bang arcade" model with Flash, other animation tools, embedded video and non-stop music, we saw the rise of the EBOC style ("Everything and a Bag O' Chips"). Technological rah-rah for its own sake did get old pretty quickly, which is the best thing one can probably say about it. At least it led to the last bullet point:

Customer-centric sites: This is where we are at present, more or less. This is a good place for design evolution to be, because as long as the customer is at the center of the design and the website rationale, service is a key focus and customer satisfaction will be high. It is incredible to think that this idea had to evolve all over again on the net after "regular business" arrived at the model years ago. Then again, the web was going to "redefine" the need for sales and earnings, too, remember? Right.

Where we are (for a minute, anyway)

Over the last 15 years or so web design has gone through a number of phases, driven by various forces in its ever-changing environment. Web browsers added a slew of features and improved functionality by a huge amount. The HTML specification matured from a rigid, structure-bound markup language to a highly extensible hybrid, while CSS has come to be widely used as a way to keep structure sequestered from content and happily ignorant of its presentation.

Not only that, but the design process itself has evolved from a mostly-art process to a fairly technical one, forcing art-oriented designers to brush up on their technology and/or partner with the company "geeks" for coding, SEO, database integration and other "tech stuff." At the same time, the marketing and sales professionals have brought their own insights (and demands) to the design phase, making the artist more of a ringmaster or coordinator than a freewheeling illustrator.

The future: What does evolution mean?

Today's corporate websites are there to serve the company's customers and other users, so the design must be both personalized and flexible. The changing expectations have combined with new capabilities to lead corporate sites on the evolutionary path from text-based to multimedia, static to dynamic, brochureware to interactivity, fixed to extensible and broadcasting to two-way conversation. It takes a team to develop and deploy a successful website, from writers and code-heads to marketing pros and, yes, graphic designers.

We don't know quite what business websites will look like in, say, 2013, but we do know that evolution doesn't stand still. Web design will continue to expand its definition, evolve in its complex environment and change in ways both predictable and unforeseen—just like it's been doing since Day One.

By: G Klingsheim

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