Monday, October 28, 2013

Website Design – Then and Now

It has been more than 12 years now since I started my career in Website Design and Development. As a matter of fact before year 2002 I was more in Graphic Designing and was designing Magazines, Brochures and other all kind of graphic design works.

But then in year 2002 my interested started to migrate in designing for Web and since then I am into website design and now I feel like share my experiences about Designing for Web then and now.

Website Design Then and Now

HTML Coding and Applications

When I started and designed my first ever website, it was for Human Rights Commission of Gujarat (India). I used Coreldraw as I just migrated from Graphic Design. I created all images I had to use on website in CorelDraw and then used Microsoft Frontpage for designing Web pages.

Those days Tables were used in HTML to setup elements on webpage, so I used to create tables, and merge and span table cells to create framework of my webpage. I created one and only animated element on the page which I created using GIF Animator software.

Responsive Web design

Responsive Design

Those days (back in 2000) in India 980px resolution monitors were new in India so web page we used to design was 767px width. But with 980px Monitors started hitting the market some of the website clients did not like their websites on center of screen with space both sides, they wanted their websites to accommodate on full width of monitor regardless of the resolution of monitor.

That condition was first in my life that I had to design website such a way it fits from 768px to 1080px monitor screen sizes taking full width of the screen. And I started designing webpages with main table width setup at 100% rather than pixel units, I used to set width of each cell in percentage Unit and finally got the results, those pages were fitting on any monitor sizes.

I don’t know I should call it responsive but that really was my first responsive experience.

Flash Website

Animated Sites

Then came the trend of Flash websites, Flash really created short term but yet powerful trend for almost all kind of websites, each client coming to me were looking for Flash website with music playing in background. Fortunately (or unfortunately) that since google was not able to read flash files, Flash trend washed off quickly except few industries like Movies, Auto as they still use or flash for their intros.

Complicated Navigation

I don’t know any of my friend designers experienced this in past or not but for some period of time I when flash was trending, people used to like complicated and tricky navigations just to show off. I still remember a case in my past that one of my client dealing in shoes wanted a navigation where you get all links coming out of shoe when user clicks on it. But like flash this trend also didn’t last long.

And Now....

But now days are changed, designs are created using HTML5, CSS3, using dreamweaver. I use Sublime Text 2 with Zen Coding plugin which makes like much easier for coding in HTML. We use jquery for basic animations and HTML5 (now google has launched web designer for html5 animations) for complicated animations.

Heavy graphics and animations, music playing in background disappeared. Laying out pages using table is forgotten. But the concept I faced in past (webpage spreads across whole width regardless of monitor resolution) is still alive but with different name.. Responsive Web Design but well the way we do it is different again.. Media Queries and HTML5

Even for SEOs life has changed drastically from then to now, google came up with regular updates to make search easy and SEO life hard. But about his SEO people may tell better unlike me.

3 comments:

Prem Aseem Jain said...

good article.

Keep sharing Mr.Manoj

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