History of The Internet and Web Design.

We are living in an era where most of us use the Internet to facilitate almost all aspect of modern life.

Websites with eye-catching web designs provide valuable information, from business, government, healthcare, etc. But, have you ever thought how the Internet and web design, as we know it today, begun?

History of the internet and web design.

Although the Internet has its origins dating back to the 1950’s, the tool that we all know and use today did not come about until the early 1990’s. However, it was not the same as we are used to today, with only very basic websites of text. Through time and technological advancement, the Internet has become a powerful tool that everyone can utilise. But it is not just about having lots of information as you also need to have an excellent looking website to keep your surfers happy.

June 8th, 1955

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee was born on June 8th, 1955 in London, England. Although he did not come up with the idea of the internet, he came to be the father of the World Wide Web that we all know and use today.

1976

Graduation

Tim graduated from The Queens College, Oxford with a first class degree in Physics. His childhood love of tinkering with toys and electronics took him to studying Physics at school and seeing his destiny. After graduating, Tim went on to work at a telecommunications company in Poole, Dorset.

1978

Moving On

In 1978, Tim joined a company called D.G. Nash, where he was given the task of helping to create typesetting software for printers.

June 1980

CERN

In 1980, Tim worked at CERN in Geneva as an independent contractor and there from June to December. In his time, there he proposed the idea of hypertext which was to be used to facilitate the exchange of data amongst researchers; and he built a prototype to demonstrate his idea which was called ENQUIRE.

1981

Networking

In 1981, Tim went on to work at John Poole’s Image Computer Systems, Ltd. While working here, Tim worked on a project which was a real-time remote procedure call. Here is where Tim gained the experience in computer networking. He continued to work there for the next three years.

1984

Back to CERN

In 1984, Tim returned to CERN; and this time as a fellow, rather than an independent contractor.

1989

The Largest Node in Europe

In the year 1989, CERN was operating the largest Internet Node in Europe. Tim had the idea of connecting his hypertext idea to the transmission control protocol and having a domain name system. The internet as we know it was born. At this time, the websites were text based and unable to generate images, which would come later. The idea of the internet started to look like something that we recognise today, and it was starting to create a lot of interest.

1990’s

Gopher

An information retrieval system was created and released by the University of Minnesota, which was a similar concept to the one that Tim helped to create. The University called their software Gopher; and for a while, there was not a lot of competition.

1991

Software Release

Tim first released his ideas in 1991 when CERN published his software. However, it would take a few years and some significant changes before his idea was going to take off in a big way. In this year, Tim published his very first website

February 1993

Some Big Changes

In February of 1993, the University announced that they were going to start charging for the license to use their reference implementation on their Gopher server, and many people began to look for an alternative.

April 1993

Free to the Public Domain

After the announcement by the University of Minnesota a few months previously, CERN announced on the 13th of April 1993 that they were releasing Tim’s creation into the public domain. They released the software for free allowing anyone to use it and build a web page. The internet as we know it was taking shape.

1994

The World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, was formed in 1994 and is an international consortium that develops web standards, and this was the brainchild of Tim and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe.

Mid 90’s

Mid 90’s

In the middle of 1990’s, the Internet was growing, and so to did the websites that people started to build. The birth of the browser that could display images was just around the corner. At this point in the decade, web designers were challenged with working with tables to create a website, but some significant changes were coming.

1995

JavaScript to the Rescue

In 1995, JavaScript was introduced and has contributed to many changes as the internet and web design have developed. JavaScript allows you to modify the order of something dynamically, but can slow down webpages as its layered on top of the rest of the webpage coding, and has to be loaded separately. Although JavaScript is still prominent today, most web developers prefer to use CSS if possible. 1995 was also the year the browser wars started, with everyone competing for a slice of the future market.

1996

Flash

In 1996, we saw Flash used on websites which allowed you to design any shape or images and have these displayed on a website. The Flash-based website was born and became very popular with some designers.

1996

The Early Beginnings of Google

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Ph. D students at Stanford University. They created Google in 1996 as their research project. They designed Google to crawl and index the Web more efficiently so that it can produce better results than existing search engines.

1997

Google.com

At first, Google used google.stanford.edu under Stanford’s website. On September 15, 1997, the domain Google.com was finally registered. On that same month, Larry Page and Sergey Brin formally launched their company, Google.

1998

The Birth of CSS

Around the same time as Flash, CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, was also being developed. You design the look and format of the page using CSS, while the content is in HTML. The system was a much better approach to style and design than Flash, but it would take a few years for the competing browsers to all be compatible.

2003

WordPress Was Born

WordPress was released on May 27, 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It’s a free open-source content management system based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress allows users to install and use different themes. It also has other features like plugins which allows users to change the look and functionality of their website.

2004

Facebook Was Launched

Facebook, a social networking service, was launched in February 4, 2004 by Harvard University students Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. At first, the use of Facebook was just limited to Harvard students. Later on, they introduced it to colleges around Boston Area and universities in Canada and the United States until it has become the one we’re using today.

2006

Twitter Was Launched

Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass created Twitter on March 2006. It is a social networking service that allows registered users to post 140-character messages or “tweets”. Twitter was launched in July 2006 and quickly became popular worldwide.

2007

A Creative Agency Was Born

In 2007, Red-Fern Media, a web design company was born, offering bespoke digital design and web development services for clients around the UK. Red-Fern Media embrace the latest technologies the web has to offer allowing for business growth for all it’s client in the digital age.

2007

A Mobile Uprising

In this year, mobile browsing was introduced which brought with it a whole host of other problems regarding the layout of a website. With so many different devices, layouts and screen sizes, it was a veritable minefield. After some time, a 960 grid system was adopted, consisting of 12 column divisions. One downside with this type of layout is that websites all look the same and lose some of their character.

2010

Responsive Websites

In 2010, we saw the launch of responsive website design which was first coined by Ethan Marcotte, which uses the same content, but different layout and design.

2015

Google Mobile Search

In 2015, Google confirmed that mobile searches overtook that of desktop and computers for the first time, an indication of the changing world and the evolving internet.

2016

The Importance of a Business Website

In 2016, we can connect with our target audience in very specific ways through the use of targeted advertising and clever marketing tactics. In this modern age, if you do not have a functional website across all platforms and media, your business is behind and not achieving its full potential. Get yourself a company website that you are proud of and market it accordingly, if you build it they will come!

Now

Working With Web Design Professionals

Creating functional solutions is what Red-Fern is all about, and their long list of clients is a testament to their abilities as a digital agency. If you’re planning to create a website that can really represent your brand and your brand’s message, you’ll never go wrong working with Red-Fern.