The History of Website Design-From Plain HTML Design to Dynamic CMS Systems

Since the inception of the World Wide Web and Internet, the number of websites has steadily increased from a few hundreds of sites in the last decade of the 19' century to millions of sites currently. Websites have not only been limited to business firms but also for schools, colleges, universities, organizations, media, entertainment, knowledge-based blogs as well as eCommerce portals selling across the internet. Web presence has become a De-Facto necessity in this digital age and serves as a quick portfolio serving as a ready reference to the business or entity, as well as facilitating easy and quick communication. There are also innumerable internal websites called Intranet sites as well as web-based applications that serve diverse uses in business firms and organizations.

Looking back at the history of websites, the first website was a web page that was designed using plain HTML (Hypertext Markup Language-A special tag-based script that a web browser can interpret and display the underlying page elements such as text, links, and multimedia without showing the actual code). This web page was written in a text editor and was converted to an HTML file and then uploaded on the server. The call to this page from a browser displayed the actual webpage that was designed. The below image shows the first-ever web page (Project.html) that was designed by Tim Bernes-Lee, known as the Father of the Internet. The page was a part of the Intranat program used by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and was created to display a static set of text that was rendered from the CERN’s server to a browser.

The First Web Page

The First URL that was created: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Since 1991, the World Wide Web started getting popular and was slowly extended for public usage in a phased manner, with Government and Academic organizations getting their internal access and then being interconnected. For almost a decade, web pages were created using a text editor and then uploaded to the server using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and then stored with a specific web address. The pages were then read from a remote browser which parses the HTML code and displays the intended text and multimedia on the web page. The era of static web pages slowly transformed into the creation of dynamic web pages that could interact with the user from the browser and transform the information to the server, which would process the required programming code to act on the received information and send back a required HTML response to the browser. A simple example would be the click of a button by a user in the browser, which would be relayed to the remote server and the underlying code in the server’s file would process the ‘Click’ and generate an appropriate response that would be sent back to the browser in an HTML format without showing the actual code that processes the data.

For almost a decade and into early 2000, web pages were created by using static HTML files and programming scripts that were uploaded to the server and viewed by a browser, with technologies such as XML, ASP and Asynchronous JavaScript helping easy web page development. This required a text editor and a UI for writing the code, for which there were many software products and platforms that were designed. The files were then manually uploaded to a remote server using FTP software with any change in the webpage requiring a recall of the existing file, changing the code, and then uploading the new version into the server. This process is still now used in a subtle way for some websites, though it has been greatly simplified to save time and easy editing of existing pages. It was during this time that renowned companies such as Dell® and Amazon® started using websites to sell their products across the web, giving birth to the now immensely popular eCommerce portals. 

The Advent of Content Management Systems and Web Designing Applications

A Web Content Management System is a software that interfaces with the website on the server and allows a remote user to login to the system and create, edit, delete and upload pages directly from any remote browser. This allows easy page design and immediate uploading of the created pages and gives users an interface through which they can work within the browser and have complete control of the webpage elements in an easy User-Interface (UI). The first CMS was GeoCities© which was launched in 1999 and was acquired by Yahoo®. 

The Yahoo GeoCities Page

Wordpress®: The World's most widely used Content Management System

Wordpress®-one of the World’s widely used CMS system was introduced in 2003 for creating blogs, and slowly improvised its features to create almost any kind of website that a user requires. It remains one of the World’s most popular CMS platforms and like other CMS platforms such as Joomla®, Drupal®, Magento®, and others-offers users "Drag and Drop" UI that allows easy addition of custom web page elements in the way the user requires the page to function. WordPress® is now used by almost 28% of all websites across the world and 59% of all websites that use a CMS.

The WordPress CMS Interface

 CMS platforms have innumerable plugins or extensions which are snippets of pre-built code that can be easily be integrated into the webpage to perform a specific functionality such as a shopping cart mechanism without having to write a separate code. This codeless approach, apart from a feature to modify existing code and HTML has made them immensely popular and the most preferred choice of web developers.

The market today has specific CMS systems for a wide variety of websites such as for normal websites, portals, eCommerce websites, discussion forums, Wiki pages, Intranet and many more. They can be easily installed in the webserver with a single click for use from a remote browser. This shows the journey of the web from the early static HTML web pages to the now dynamic web pages that allow even browser-side programming, and the widely popular CMS systems that have redefined the ease of creating websites.

Conclusion: The World Wide Web has a long way to go in the coming years, and constant innovations such as an adaptive rendition of web pages across mobiles and tablets are an indication of the pace at which the web is undergoing an accelerated transformation. Internet access has also seen a tremendous acceleration in speed and ease of access, stating from Dial-Up phone modems to the current DSL and WiFi internet connections. Keep browsing WebTekTalk for more updates.