Once the novelty of simply having a website wore off, it was time to get serious about effective design. The evolution of web design and development that occurred from 1995 to 1998 would drastically change the history of web design.

Enter JavaScript. This is where design began to differentiate from development, as Javascript was the first programming language that could add motion to static websites with interactive effects.

HTML 2.0 was released in 1995, supporting graphics, forms, tables, and more. This gave developers more creative liberties in page organization.

As tools for design and development became more sophisticated, web users began to expect more from their online experiences. As a result, Apple coined the term, “User Experience” at a computer systems conference.

In 1996, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) became available and directed the display and style of HTML coded design elements like colour, layout, and typography. HTML and CSS were a power duo, but CSS would eventually replace HTML tables with the exception of data requiring true tabular layout.

Web animation was next to the stage, and Macromedia Flash 1.0 took the web by storm. But it was not without its faults. Animations could only run if a website was equipped with the Flash plugin extension, otherwise the animation would show up blank. This posed a significant problem for websites built entirely on Flash. In addition, the heavy lifting that was required behind the scenes to bring the animations to life also meant slower page loading.

Downfalls aside, Flash ushered in an era of page improvement through movement. It served the web well and played a significant role in the history of web design. That role, however, came to an end on December 31, 2020, when Adobe ended the support of Flash and Windows removed Flash from all browsers.

In 1998, Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google Beta as part of a research project that explored indexing page results based on relevant search terms. Page and Brin could not have known the magnitude of what they had just created and how Google would influence and change both the internet and web designing. As Google became a major search engine, the term “Search Engine Optimization” began to be thrown around, and businesses sought ways to improve their rank. Interestingly, because Flash animation required a plugin extension to work, it was invisible to Google.

Web capability was growing and ecommerce and online payments now allowed businesses to shift analogy payment processes to digital. PayPal (which was actually named Confinity for the first two years), launched in 2000 and established itself as a front runner in online transactions.

Online shopping anyone?