Web site vs. website: A Brief History of Websites
In the basic sense, a website is a set of web pages that contain text, images, video and other information. Today, however, we know that websites are much more than that; most every business needs a website in order to survive—and some businesses run entirely from a website.
As with all things, it’s important to know the history—so we know how we got to where we are today, and how to keep improving in the future. So, here’s a little website history lesson:
The Internet was born on October 26, 1969, at UCLA. A group of researchers, including Steve Crocker, sent the first message via what would later become the modern Internet.
The first website, launched in August 1991, was a basic site that provided information about the WWW project. Since very few people had the ability to access a web browser, the site was primarily used for sharing information about the WWW project amongst colleagues at CERN.
There were 2,738 websites by mid-1994, including sites from The Internet Movie Database (IMDB), MTV, Ohio State University’s Department of Computer and Information Science, and the White House. By the end of that year, however, the total number of websites surpassed 10,000.
First-generation websites had very limited layouts. All sites were built with basic HTML and only included a few colors or graphics and were heavy with text. From 1995-1996, both GeoCities and Angelfire launched, allowing people to build their own websites. Fourth generation websites use HTML 5, JavaScript, Flash and CSS. These sites, which we first started seeing in 1996, are viewed on modern browsers like Safari, Firefox and Chrome.
As you can see, we’ve come a long way in the past twenty years. Today’s websites are robust, multi-faceted and full of images, video and the opportunity for interaction. The introduction of web-enabled devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have presented new web design challenges, as well as new opportunities to reach potential customers. Safe to say, the past twenty years have been huge for websites, only time will tell what the next twenty years will bring.
SOUND OFF: What are your favorite website advancements through the years? Is your website up to today’s tech standards?
