In Depth: Highs and lows of a decade in web design: "
As the clocks rang in the year 2000, things were looking good. The dotcom boom was in full swing and web designers were the new rock stars.
But then, barely before the champagne had time to go flat, things took a nasty turn.
The boom turned into bust as investment disappeared and tech firms went to the wall. Boo.com, launched in autumn of the previous year, was one victim, going bankrupt in May 2000 after spending its way through more than £80million.
Over the following two years, around $5trillion was wiped off the market value of tech companies. Pets.com folded in November 2000. eToys, with an IPO share price of $80, was to go bust in March 2001, and internet currency site Beenz.com went under in the same year.
Paul Wyatt, designer and writer, describes the start of the decade as one 'where everyone became a web designer and the world and his wife had a good idea to make a million on the web'. But it wasn't to last.
Paul Boag, creative director at Headscape, remembers the time well: 'I first started in the web back in 1994,' he says.
'By the turn of the century I was working at a dotcom company at the height of the boom. I remember being told that I would soon be a millionaire. Even at the time this struck me as insane. Like so many dotcoms, the company I worked for was built on hype and had no real business case. It was obvious to me that in reality the company was worthless.'
Born again
But out of these ashes would come a reborn, more efficient industry. 'The dotcom bust left a lot of talented people out of work, and in this downtime they started to experiment and innovate,' says Boag. 'We soon saw dramatic shifts in how the web is built, including the birth of the web standards movement and the reinvention of JavaScript.
WEB STANDARDS: The Web Standards Project has fought for the guidelines that make the web so accessible today
'What we're left with is a much more stable platform. It's easier and cheaper than ever to build great web apps without the need for external investment. What would have cost hundreds of thousands to develop back in 2000 is now available free through third-party APIs and libraries.'
'The web has truly matured over the past decade,' agrees Usman Sheikh, managing director of Contrive Digital. 'We've seen businesses starting to understand and harness the power of the internet to support their operational and commercial objectives.
'Ecommerce is no longer a luxury only the larger retailers can afford. With great open source and feature-rich platforms arriving in the market, we've seen smaller retailers give the big boys a run for their money.'
Dynamic sites
'I think the most significant change in web design this decade has been the evolution to building dynamic sites,' says Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks. 'A friend of mine is an IT guy/web admin at a university, and he has students coming to him all the time asking for help building sites for a project. He just tells them, 'Go to WordPress.com and you'll have a site up in no time'.
WORDPRESS: WordPress has been criticised for stunting creativity by encouraging people to follow similar templates
'That answer in the early 2000s would have been 'I hope you're up for learning some HTML. Now, open Microsoft FrontPage...' The process was confusing and the student would have probably given up. Today it's almost a no-brainer.'
But there is a downside to this, as Craig Grannell, a regular contributor to .net magazine and TechRadar, points out: 'Because of the relative simplicity of the likes of WordPress, there's still the assumption that web design is simple and therefore designers should be charging about a fiver for an all-singing, all-dancing website.'
Shane Mielke, creative director at 2Advanced Studios agrees: 'Flash templates, while a useful and cost-effective solution, have degraded the credibility of those of us who design and develop custom solutions for clients. I think the adoption of WordPress and templated portfolio communities has also marked a low point as there seem to be fewer unique personal sites being released with that wow factor that was present earlier in the decade.'
AJAX: Ajax has been instrumental in making web apps useful and accessible to all
Flash had a bit of an image problem at the start of the decade, being viewed as inaccessible and a waste of bandwidth. 'There was a tendency for designers to get carried away and create experiences that alienated those without the faster connections,' remembers Rob Corradi, creative director at NeonState.
'Flash is still overused and poorly used, although not as much as it was in the mid-2000s, when lots of idiots suggested that Flash should be 'it' for web design,' adds Grannell. 'Flash has always been great for certain things, but I was relieved when JavaScript libraries started taking over from Flash when it came to UI elements.
'Bandwidth hogging and waste remains a huge issue, though. Many designers are fat and lazy, pumping out bandwidth-intensive output that works fine on their set-ups, but that could be faster and sleeker with relatively little effort.'
'These days there can still be a lot of waiting around watching preloaders spinning – designers' work often seems to swell to fill the width of whatever pipes it travels along,' says Corradi. 'However, at least Flash is now mostly used where Flash is best, and has become the platform for online video and unique interactive experiences.'
FLEX: Flash has gone from strength to strength over the past decade, bolstered by a number of technological developments such as Flex
'Flash continues to go from strength to strength,' agrees Mike Jones, founder of Pixadecimal. 'With the introduction of the Flex framework to assist rapid app development, the ability to deploy Flash content to the desktop through AIR and support for devices, Flash is the media of choice when it comes to offering rich immersive experiences and application-orientated solutions.'
'In the last decade, the single most important thing that happened with regards to web design was when Flash video was incorporated in the Flash authoring tool in Flash MX 2002 and Flash Player 6,' says Rob Ford, founder and principal of the Favourite Website Awards.
'This finally enabled creatives to do what they had been fighting with for years, easily adding video to their projects rather than trying to embed video players. Without this development, YouTube would not be what it is today and the web would be a very different place.'
'Flash has really withstood the test of time because of the diversity in how it's used: microsites, games, banner ads, applications, video playback,' says Mielke. 'Every year it improves, adapts and morphs its uses on the internet. I believe it's also the main reason why front-end developers have pushed harder to develop other techniques like Ajax, which gives us even more creative options.'
Standard compliance
Is there an automated app that will make web designers' lives easy? Not any time soon, says Ryan Carson of Carsonified. 'Almost all truly great web designers are still hand-coding. No one has been able to create a piece of software that solves this problem: how can a WYSIWYG editor truly produce standards-compliant, semantic and accessible markup?'
Jakob Nielsen is confident of improvements in accessible sites: 'If improvements continue at the current rate, we'll achieve maybe 80 per cent success rates by 2020. Getting rid of the 20 per cent of failures will require substantial usability advances, which will probably take more than 10 years. But improving the web's usability quality to the 80 per cent level can be done without breaking a sweat: sites just have to follow the basic usability guidelines that were documented at the beginning of the current decade.'
ANDROID: Google's Android platform has provided an exciting challenge for a new generation of web developers
Following advice that's already 10 years old? Ought to be a piece of cake. 'The next decade will also finally see the mobile web turn mainstream,' Nielsen continues.
'Right now, mobile sites are still beneath contempt. A recent study by Nielsen Norman Group found that users only succeeded 38 per cent of the time when trying to access sites on mobile phones. In other words, the current mobile success rate is even worse than it was for desktop use in 2000.
'When we asked British users to find out 'what's on BBC1 tonight at 8pm' using their mobile phones, they took 199 seconds to find the answer. Much worse than our study of WAP users in 2000, when the same task only required 159 seconds. We have gone backwards in mobile usability!
'What we need is for companies to start designing dedicated mobile sites that are optimised for these more constrained devices. The old web ideal of 'design once, view anywhere' has failed and should be discarded.'
User interaction
'The biggest change is likely to be in the way people interact with content,' adds Craig Grannell. 'In whatever a 'typical' browser evolves into, a lack of precision will lead to different interface design, with accessibility at the forefront. We're already seeing this in the shift from desktop machines to mobile, where a prodding finger is way less accurate than a mouse pointer, but also in the way you directly interact with content rather than doing so in an abstract way via a pointing device.'
Grannell also warns against the design-once mentality: 'Information will increasingly be accessed across hugely varying devices. While I don't think we'll get back to the bad old days of designing for every device, mobile will be increasingly important, and even when devices evolve in terms of underlying power, people will still want fast, efficient web experiences on the go, rather than sluggish, time-wasting experiences.'
Rob Corradi agrees: 'As we're about to enter a new decade in which new platforms emerge almost yearly, designing and building to standards and thinking multi-platform is more important than ever. With netbooks, smartphones, consoles and more, all with different processing power, different screen sizes and input methods accessing what we make, one size no longer fits all.'
'Ten years is a lifetime in terms of the web and technology,' adds Shane Mielke. 'I think you'll see web-enabled phones, watches and PDAs become items that potentially control every electronic item we own. I think we'll see 'web design' as it's currently defined start moving away from just websites viewed on computers and grow to encompass other media. It really is exciting because it means a constant evolution for everyone and the opportunities to work on projects for TV, computer, cellphone, and so on, where currently we're limited to our own little niche of the internet.'
'Mobile, mobile, mobile,' says Margaret Manning, CEO at Reading Room. 'While I think there may be some rough times ahead, it's undeniable that mobile is where we're all going. I think there are some really interesting design and usability challenges coming up – we've all got used to the luxury of working in lots of space on large screens. Mobile shakes things up a bit – in the way we design and in what we give to the end user.'
'Everyone is going to say mobile, of course,' says Brendan Dawes. 'For me it's not really about that, but more about context. I want the thing I use to interact with the web to know what I'm doing, where I am and to simply work like magic. Yeah. Magic. Let's have more of that.'
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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
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