Get in touch today to find out how we can help your business succeed

Get your business website up and running today

How have web technologies evolved with time?

The web is built on several technologies working together to produce the dynamic resource it has become. But what are these, and how did they come about?

The basic building block of the web is a markup language called HTML. This enables content to be presented to the user in a particular way using 'tags'. Without it the web simply couldn't function. HTML was introduced as an experimental technology in 1992, allowing web designers to build a page using text, images and a basic framework to share information to users browsing remotely from their computer.

Mosaic was the first browser to be released, and despite it being launched eons ago in web technology terms, it is still recognizable to a user of a web browser today. Opera and Internet Explorer soon followed, as did HTML2, an evolution of HTML. In a relatively short space of time HTML3 and HTML4 were introduced, and included significant input from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in order to ensure that competing interests from involved parties wouldn't compromise the technology.

HTML4 would become recognized as THE version of HTML for the next ten years because of this, the '4' was invariably dropped in favour of just 'HTML'.

Meanwhile, Javascript, Java and Flash were developed and launched to allow greater complexity in the design, animation, interactivity and functionality of websites. CSS was then introduced to separate the content of a webpage and its styling. Several other browsers followed, including Safari, Firefox and Chrome, and small updates were made in the guise of XML in the following 10 years but it wasn't until 2008 and the introduction of HTML5/CSS3 that HTML made a serious leap forward. HTML5 gave the designer and the user even more scope for dynamic, interactive client side content, running natively in the browser, Flash having been long since phased out due to its reliance on a third-party plugin.

Maddison Creative web design Newcastle were founded in 2009

Today, the main driver of technology change is the increasing number of devices that browsers use to access websites - mobile phones, tablets, touchscreen devices - all dictate how websites are built, replacing the once ubiquitous desktop browser.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how is it affected by web design?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is something that affects your website from start to finish. Every element in the construction and design of your site can have an impact on SEO, which is effectively another way of describing best-practice for websites, only the best practice guidelines were written by Search Engines, such as Google and Bing, in order to ensure only relevant websites of sufficient quality are returned when someone does a search. This ensures that only websites that have adhered to accessiblity and useability standards get the search engine performance they so keenly seek, and that those who don't won't be found, encouraging them to adopt best-practice in the process.

SEO incorporates your site's content, how it is written, whether it is written well and whether or not it relates to the search the user has just performed. It also encompasses your design and your coding, looking out for whether or not everything is tagged properly and coded in such a way that browsers can clearly determine how to render everything, and that users with special needs such as visual impairments are also having their needs met.

One downside of the need for SEO is that content written specifically to perform well for SEO isn't necessarily the easiest to read from a human perspective. This is because the more prevalent a keyword or keywords are, the more significance a search engine places on that term, which can result in copy bing little more than a long list of keywords.

A good web designer/developer will do this as they are building your site, but there is always scope for improvement and refinement, especially as technology develops and guidelines and best-practice recommendations shift with that progression.

Can you update and develop my existing website, built by someone else?

Yes, not only can we build you a website from scratch, but we can also work with what you already have to increase performance, update any branding you might have, or bring the technology up to speed. Essentially we can give it a new lease of life!

Flat websites vs CMS - what's the difference?

There are two main categories of website: the flat/HTML brochure style website and the CMS (Content Management System) website. The main difference is that the website owner cannot update the flat/HTML website without web design/development knowledge. They are intended to be built and managed by the web designer/developer, and whenever the site owner requires an update to the site, they would go back to their designer/developer who will be able to make the update for them. This works well for sites that don't require many updates, as they are more cost effective for the site owner, taking less time to set up and build than their CMS counterpart. Flat/HTML websites also traditionally have limited functionality.

A CMS website is built on the back of a content management system (Wordpress for example) and is generally connected to a data source; A database for example (other data-sources are available!). They are also built using more complex programming language; php or ASP.NET for example (along with HTML in many cases) to allow for a greater scope for functionality, enabling the user to interact with the site in much more depth. The main benefit of a CMS website however is that they can be updated and managed by the website owner without any prior knowledge or experience in website technologies. Because they are more complex however, they will cost more than a flat/HTML site, but this is balanced out by virtue of the fact that the site owner does not have to pay a web designer/developer to make updates.

More answers to web design questions...

Where to next?