By Rick Mendes of The Elixir Haus
The Birth Of The Internet
In the 90’s the World Wide Web took a foothold. It was a network of interconnected computers known as the internet, or “the web.” It offered an opportunity to bridge the communication gap created by distance and insufficient broadcasting power. This began a golden age in communication technology and from it emerged possibilities civilization had never before dreamed of.
This age allowed the publication of vast amounts of information to be created and exchanged. As the web grew, no longer was a person’s access to news limited to the decimation of corporate and government media. No longer was your business’ audience limited to who you could hand a brochure to.
Publishing information on the web was supported by a primary layout and formatting syntax called (Hypertext Markup Language) HTML. It was a variation of (Extensible Markup Language) XML that included standardized formatting tags, that when wrapped around text would enable web application style formatting.
The execution of any given published web page was a tedious juggling act of table cells and once images were supported by browsers, creative image implementations. This, while trying to accommodate issues in display inconsistencies across a variety of browsers. If you don’t remember the use of 1 pixel image spacers to keep table cells sized perfectly, you don’t know the struggle!
HTML was easily written in a basic text editor like NotePad, but it was soon realized how many mistakes could be made in the creation of a large pages or web applications. More sophisticated tools were then introduced with HTML format validators like the one in the popular HTML editor Dreamweaver, and to this day are very useful.
As the demand for business websites grew, the development of them required the need for teams to construct them. This led to multiple people often working on the same files which inevitably led to the overwriting of work. The ability to check in and out of files with the adoption of version control tools helped protect work and track the accountability of edits.
As the web flourished alternatives to HTML were explored like the plugin driven VRML and Flash. Flash was a vector-based animation tool. A user could view powerful animated and interactive content making for extremely captivating experiences. The power of Flash made for such beautiful websites, that the most popular Flash sites launched clients, studios, and web designers into the limelight as industry superstars.
Flash unfortunately didn’t lend itself to keyword and other SEO content necessities. When the iPhone launched, it curiously couldn’t support Flash’s animation capabilities and was criticized as leading to its downfall.
The early Web was a wild wild west of executions in page formatting. It was Jeffery Zeldmen who pioneered the establishment of a series of Web Standards to be established by the W3C (World Wide Web) Consortium, ushering in a more domesticated and formalized web world based on “semantic” html tagging. The only drawback was the variety of web browsers that were popular and their inconstancy in rendering webpages. This required many hours of Quality Assurance (QA) testing, adjustments, and hacks. To this day many web developers still awake in cold sweats fearing they may need to make a client site support Internet Explorer 5.5 for some CEO’s antiquated laptop. If you know you know.
The Internet Continued Marching Forward
Early sites were primarily developed on Windows servers. Their management involved expensive Microsoft licensing and involved the programing coding language ASP.NET. As an alternative, license free Linux hosting systems became popular. They supported the programing language PHP, which in turn led to a growing online support community that helped the aspiring non-window licensed developer gain experience.
It’s a blur to me, but as web companies exploded, more sophisticated languages became the foundation for larger platforms and web applications.
Web Management
Back in the day, if you didn’t have the knowhow to build a website, Yahoo!’s GeoCities was your go-to platform, giving you the tools to make your online presence known. As web companies grew, demands for sophisticated management tools for the laymen to edit their websites were requested. The solution offered was a constant reinvention and re-envisioning of forms, user management, and modules that would give your client the tools they needed to customize their web site. This approach often led to buggy sites, complicated user interfaces, security risks, and lack of support.
The need for a formal (Content Management System) CMS was hugely fulfilled by Drupal. Drupal allowed for the creation of reusable page layout templates and modules, and allowed the content management of all site pages. The drawback of Drupal was many users found it clunky, ridged, and unintuitive.
In Comes WordPress
There was another more agile and simpler management tool popular with bloggers named WordPress. The ability to easily skin and customize your WordPress blog site along with the library of pre-made “themes” you could download and apply to your blog, made it an ideal CMS. The big drawback to WordPress is that it was an article publishing platform that didn’t support a hierarchy of individual pages. After years of community criticism, WordPress then released the ability to create Pages along with articles. From this point on, WordPress became a default standard for most marketing websites comprising 70% of all web sites on the net.
Managing To Manage It All
Adding to the moving and evolving parts in creating a website is the litany of technical communication between parties just like with any multifaceted project. As teams quickly realized the impossibility of managing projects through a litany of email strings, Basecamp became everyone’s go-to project management tool allowing the integration of your clients to comment on and manage tasks. Seasoned classic computer developers used a project management tool named JIRA, but there was a UI sensibility to the tool that the modern web company found too cumbersome to use. Basecamp had a simple elegance to it that became more attractive and desirable in its web industry sophistication.
Unfortunately, like a good band’s new record deal, the creative vision leading the evolution of Basecamp lost sight of much of what made it so popular, and teams began to explore other options. Since then, there’s been no shortage of project management tools to emerge with the effort to capitalize off the need within the industry that Basecamp highlighted.
Another trend to emerge was to create a more “agile” approach to project management. Like every created construction project, there was hardly a project estimate that wasn’t underestimated. The Agile approach was an iterative process. This worked great for internal development teams, but is to this day a hard sell to many potential clients who need cost and effort defined upfront.
The Rise Of The Black Hat
As the indexing process became more transparent, marketers found ways to “buck the system” with techniques such as keyword stuffing (cramming as many key words into the keyword meta tag as possible,) Copy Cloaking (hiding Search Engine Optimized text on a page that was different than what the user’s readable content is) for search engine BOTs to index in order to give the page a higher ranking.
As cheating became more prevalent, Search Engines became more sophisticated in the algorithms they used in indexing. It was now important to be conscious of the url titling, the depth of your page in the directory, the titling of your directories, as well as the titling of your images and alternative image text (alt text). New and evolving instruments helped define the legitimacy of your content and give it extended search capabilities, such as Google Structured Data and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as well as a page’s load speed, and special accessibility properties.
Companies emerged with specific expertise in the latest trends, requirements, and best practices in crafting content and site structure to optimize client sites not just for look and engagement, but for search engine ranking. For many unfamiliar with SEO, these companies seemed to wield black magic, and their costs seemed to reflect that. Over the years that aspect of the industry has become more integrated and normalized within web teams, but has emerged as yet another key department of web development.
The Modern Web
In a sea of preprocessing, static generators, the emergence of Web 3.0, Google supremacy, and 3rd party site builders, there is an overwhelming plethora of web design and development approaches. This makes it easy for the inexperienced to become overwhelmed.
Below is a checklist for any web designer which helps “keep their eye on the prize” and not be distracted by the bells and whistles that often become trendy. This was Bruce Lee’s approach to fighting, he studied may fighting styles, and removed the style formalities to utilize the key techniques.
If you can achieve the list below you’ve executed a professional site.
A site with a standardized or low dependency development environment
Intuitive SEO optimized architecture
Allows for easy content updating by laymen
Scores well by primary web performance metrics
Visual design that is balanced and consistent with uses of colors, fonts, and spacing
This is a field constantly changing. If you’re hoping in now, don’t think you have a lot of catching up to do, you just got caught up. Now you can lead the forefront of the industry with all the new approaches of today.
