How do you grow your business from the ground up? One way you could do this is to start promoting online and building a website. These days, especially since the virus outbreak, it’s essential for your business to build an online presence. According to a report from Joint ASEAN Network 10, most of the consumers in Singapore are “avid online shoppers”. To capture this market share of online shoppers, your website needs to be well-designed and user friendly. This is where the importance of web design and development comes in. It is the key to successfully attract users to purchase your products and services online.
How Important is Web Design and Development?
Would you continue browsing through the website if it’s outdated and disorganised? You might start questioning the credibility of this website. Stanford University has conducted a few studies about web credibility, and they found out that most of the users are judging a site’s credibility mostly based on its visual aesthetics. As the saying goes, “First Impression Matters”— this proves how important having a good web design is.
How Web Development Has Evolved Throughout the Years
Website design and development have certainly advanced along with the technological innovations over the years – from purely just text-based then progressively to table-based, Flash and eventually CSS-based designs. It’s now an important business tool for brand promotion and establishing a strong online presence. In this article, learn how it started and how it evolved through time.
Early Days (1990 – 2000)
Back then, sites were so simple that you could only see some texts and links. Users do not pay much attention to its design because the sole purpose of websites is to provide research reports. So, developers used a simple markup language called HTML to build websites. However, the problem with HTML is that it is difficult to maintain, so it was short-lived. Eventually, web developers switched to Javascript in 1996. Along with it, Flash was introduced to add animations on websites. The online space became an engaging space for users because of these animated graphics.
Thanks to the addition of moving graphics, a large number of sites started popping up. This made it quite a challenge for users to get access to relevant links, but it was a good thing that a search engine giant like Google was launched in 1998. It filtered hundreds of sites according to user search relevance.
Turn of the 21st Century (2001 – 2016)
At this point, businesses started to realise the importance of website design. Thus, developers are not just the ones who took the lead of creating sites— designers began to take charge too.
Web designers utilised the capabilities of CSS2 to take more control of the elements of a website. Although it did make websites look more organised, designers later realised that squeezing too much content on one page is too overwhelming for users. To fix this problem, these designers decided to split web information into various web pages and made the landing page as the main web page. When a user clicks on a website, he will end up on the landing page first, so this part of the site is given utmost importance.
This era was also the period where website design and development shifted its focus on mobile web design. It’s because, at that time, consumers are starting to use their mobile phones to search for a specific item. To make sites more accessible to mobile users, developers and designers adopted a “Responsive Web Design”
Current State of Web Design (2017 – Present)
Web designs continue to evolve, and design trends change so often. However, JavaScript remains to be one of the most relevant programming languages for building sites. Another important change is that sites are now designed to meet the best SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) practices. With SEO, it’s easier for a website to reach its target audience online.
Indeed, the best web design practises always change, but you need to adapt to these changes. Remember, good web design is paramount to business success because it helps attract more customers online. So, if you are planning to start your own business, and you want to gain more clients, consult a website design company in Singapore.
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