The very first website on the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee who designed the website at the Swiss research centre, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). You can still access the basic CERN website which was developed for the purpose of distributing information to other researchers.

Not only is Berners-Lee credited as the first web designer, he also created Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), with which he coded the CERN site. He would go on to found the World Wide Web Consortium which still oversees development of web standards today.

In the early web design days, HTML’s <table> function was the only way to organize information by assigning data to columns and rows. No colour blocks, no images, no graphics, just text. A far cry from what we consider “web design” today.

The World Wide Web continued to grow and only 2 years later, the world’s first search engine was born. ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web), was a web page that organized links into the categories of computing, entertainment, living, money, newsstand, recreation, research, and shopping.

ALIWEB also utilized a new form of organization – colour. A yellow background separated the categories and made it easier for users to quickly identify what they were looking for. Like the first website, ALIWEB is still alive today. In fact, clicking the “BMW” link in the Auto category will take you to BMW’s present-day site.

As the number of websites grew, so did the concept of using website design to achieve business goals. Landing pages began to sprout up around 1993, and drew users in with colour and invitations to “Click Here to Enter”, or “Sign Up Now”.

Hotwire (now Wired Magazine) pioneered the first web banner ad in 1994, and had the subtle message of, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will”. Brilliant. Websites exploded in popularity in the early 90s. One website in 1991. A total of 2,738 in 1994. And for historical context, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com in 1994. Houston, we have liftoff.