Website the world wide communication

Website the world wide communication have changed quite a bit since their inception and now include many different flavors and varieties. In this article, I will describe for you a brief history of websites, show you how we arrived where we are today, and provide some suggestions on which website technology may be right for you.
Back in the 1990’s, when websites were becoming increasingly popular, most of the websites were static html. Static html implied that each page was planned out and hand coded to match the plan. Many of these sites were created by specialized website development firms who understood the complexities of this new technology. This creation by an outside firm meant that once the site was created, it was not updated often unless the site owner knew html. Many of the sites created during this time were simply extensions of an organization’s existing marketing materials. The focus at this time was to get a presence on the web quickly. Another reason organizations jumped into a website was the ability to have organization domain specific email addresses like joe@example.com.

The blogging trend of 2000 ushered in a new era for websites. A weblog or blog is another way to say a webpage. The term blog refers to a collection of blog entries, which are truly just web pages. The blogging tools like Movable Type, Blogger, and WordPress offered a mechanism for organization owners to make their websites more dynamic. In most cases, the tools were freely available. These tools utilized php code and database functionality underneath a website to dynamically serve content. The owners weren’t exposed to the complexity of the underlying system, which in turn freed them up to focus on their website content. A key feature of these tools was the ability to add a page on the fly, with the tools handling the previous complexity of creating an html page. Essentially, in this setup, a blog entry was a piece of content or web page. Following on the coattails of the blogging revolution was the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG pronounced WIZ-e-WIG) editor. This allowed the site owner to create a new page with the blogging tools and add feature rich content like text and images without knowing any html whatsoever. By making it super easy to add rich content, more organizations started to adopt these blogging platforms.

Around this time, websites created with Adobe Flash (Formerly Macromedia Flash) technology began to gain steam. These websites allowed a richer user experience that standard html websites by including native support for animation, video, and sound. These sites were usually very appealing to the end user. Most of the Flash websites were similar to the initial static websites in that their content was static and usually built by a specialized web development firm. It didn’t take long before some websites were coded 100% in Flash. Although this provided a unique experience for the end user, the robots that scan web pages often had a tough time deciphering the page content. This meant that much of the content in the website was never indexed by the likes of Google which in turn made it difficult for search users to find the sites. This caveat of Flash led to what we see today, html websites with small amounts of Flash inside of them.

The blogging platforms were taken one step further by the concept of content management systems (CMS). Content management systems extended the functionality of blogging tools by allowing users to expand the content types from a blog post, to anything they desired (instead of just a blog post, imagine a content type of service offered, menu item, or event). For example, a restaurant could define a type of content in their website as a menu item, and then define what fields a menu item should contain(title, description, price).

Once defined, the restaurant owner simply has to click "Add new menu item" to update a menu. Another example would be a fitness club that offers a set schedule of classes. In this example site, a content type of classes could be defined with a description and date/time. Some of the more popular CMS frameworks are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Drupal and Joomla are both open source content management systems. There are two important points to the open source type of software, they are free to use and they are supported by a worldwide community of developers who continuously improve the tools. These frameworks have brought advancements to website development. Development firms now focus on customizing the framework to exactly what the client wants instead of building a custom solution from the ground up. This web development trend has shifted the focus from creation to customization.

The future of the web is trending towards social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. These new tools are supplementing the previous generation of tools by offering aggregated feeds of user information. Instead of a customer coming to your site directly, many of them will now follow your organization on Facebook or Twitter so they can see your updates without ever having to go to your organization’s website.

So where does this leave your organization? All of the previous website development tools are still available in one form or another. You should look at your requirements for a website and determine which solution is correct for you. If you just need a simple website with a few pages, a static website may be best for you. If you want to be able to dynamically add a single type of content to your site, one of the blogging platforms will suit your needs. If you want to be able to dynamically add content to your website and you will have multiple content types (menu item, event, testimonials) look into content management systems.