Decade in Web Design
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With 2010 started, the new decade has begun. But how did we get to here?
In this article, we’re going to look at the major events from each year in the past decade that have helped develop the web design industry. Try keeping a tab on how many affected you, I bet you’ll run out of fingers quite quickly!
2000
The decade started off poorly for web industries. In the previous 2 or 3 years, the Dot-Com Bubble was a time of rapid growth for companies moving to trade online. In 2000, the bubble burst and many web companies went bust.
One success story from the middle of all this was a simple bulletin board project. The open-source phpBB system was first made publicly available in July, and today is the most popular free forums system around.
2001
b2, a primitive blogging system was created under the GPL. If you have a look at its first ever post, you’ll find it’s still characteristic of the default post in its successor; WordPress.
In May, the W3C propose the first Working Draft for CSS 3. The first work on CSS3 was started in 1998, and over a decade on, it’s still a work in progress.
In August, what would arguably be the most hated piece of software in the decade was released; Internet Explorer 6. At least now, we can start to say goodbye.
2002
Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in 2002. This popular social networking site was to be the forerunner of countless similar sites, including MySpace and Facebook.
The RSS 2.0 specification was released in September. This format (And the later spin-off, Atom) allowed content to be shared independent of formatting, and for it to be manipulated in any way the user chose.
2003
During 2003, David Heinemeier began work on Ruby on Rails. This open-source webapp framework has grown to massive popularity and the PHP vs. Ruby on Rails debate is a famous one now.
Two years on from the creation of b2 and things weren’t going too well; the core developer had vanished and updates were non-existent. Enter Matt Mullenweg with his thoughts on forking the development, and WordPress was born.
In June, Jeffrey Zeldman published Designing With Web Standards (Now in its 3rd Edition). This book helped shape the web design industry by providing a compelling justification for companies to work with standards based coding.
A List Apart regularly publishes some of the best articles around. One example of this came in 2003 when Patrick Griffiths published his Suckerfish Dropdowns article on creating a light-weight, standards-compliant, accessible dropdown. In a time of DHTML, this was a godsend, and was later followed up by Sons of Suckerfish.
In August, several eUniverse employees (including the world-famous Tom) got together and set up a Friendster-inspired website; MySpace. eUniverse’s massive userbase would give this site the headstart in the early years, but its future adversary wouldn’t be long in coming.
In October, a lonely student at Harvard set up Facemash, a site for comparing pictures of 2 other students to see who looked better. Although quickly closed down, it would be the forerunner for what happened next…
2004
In January, our not-so-lonely student took the next step and created Facebook, which Alexa today ranks as the number 2 site in the world.
Also in the beginning of 2004, 37Signals released Basecamp, a project management tool. 37Signals and their products have since become the poster child for simple design (Not to mention an online success story!)
On April Fool’s Day, Google is well-known for taking part in the jokes over the years. In 2004’s April Fool’s, they announced a free mail service with 1GB of storage. Obviously a joke, Hotmail only gave 2MB…
And on a related note, Gmail was the first example of AJAX being used in a major application. Since then, it’s been used in countless other websites.
Towards the end of the year, Version 1.0 of the “Phoenix Project” was released. By this point though, it had been renamed to the much more familiar, Firefox.
2005
In April, Mike Industries released sIFR, a technique for bringing richer typography to the web via Flash.
Also in April, Adobe acquired Macromedia for a massive $3.4 billion. Industry standard tools like Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash would now be incorporated into the Adobe Creative Suites.
In October, Safari became the first browser to pass the Acid2 test. The Acid tests were developed to test browser support for web standards and to help encourage all browsers to use the same standards.
The first ever An Event Apart kicked off in Philadelphia in December. One of the top design conferences in the industry, there have been 17 more events since, with 4 more planned for 2010.
2006
In January, Opera Mini received a worldwide release. It was created for mobile browsing and claims to be the world’s most popular mobile browser.
Also in January, JQuery was released at Barcamp NYC by John Resig. Since then it has become the most popular JavaScript library in use today.
Come February, Yahoo launched YUI2, a framework for making webapp development easier. YUI3 was released in September 2009, but version 2 still enjoys massive popularity.
In March, Jack Dorsey published the first ever Tweet. Approaching the end of the decade, the “twttr project” has finally reached profitability (with vowels included).
In October, Google purchased Youtube for $1.65 billion. That story has inspired countless other web startups.
Microsoft FrontPage was first released in 1997 and aside from horrendous table-based layouts with flashing marquees, the FrontPage Extensions necessary to use features of it on web servers were a nightmare. In December 2006, Microsoft discontinued the product.
2007
By 2007, MovableType, a proprietary competitor to WordPress, was being left behind as WordPress’ community grew and grew. To help grow their own community, they released a GPL version of MovableType, but still much more restricted than WordPress.
In early June 2007, Adobe released Adobe AIR. This runtime environment allowed developers to create desktop apps using web technologies like AJAX and Flash, to run on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux).
And of course, in June 2007 Steve Jobs presented a rather interesting keynote. An iPhone, you say?
In November, Amazon launched a new book reader, the Kindle. As web developers, we’re used to our content being available on different mediums, so the Kindle and other eBook readers are an interesting development to watch.
2008
In March, the 960 Grid System was released by Nathan Smith. This CSS framework was designed to let you quickly mock-up web layouts using only HTML.
Since Firefox’s original release in 2004, it had been steadily gaining popularity. A single day in June was to showcase this; on the 17th June, ‘Download Day’, Firefox 3 set a world record by being downloaded over 8 million times in 24 hours.
The iPhone had been released for just one year now and already had a massive following. With the release of the app store in July, the iPhone’s future dominance was all but guaranteed.
In the Autumn, the HTC Dream became the first available phone running Google’s Android operating system. Trumped up as an iPhone killer, HTC and other Android phones may not have lived up to that name, but it has certainly gained a massive market share.
In December, Google Chrome became publicly available. This web browser is based on WebKit but optimized to put speed first, and with a minimal interface for the user.
2009
BuddyPress, the WordPress MU-based social network extension was first released in April. It has had strong development even in the short time since then and now packs a lot of features.
In June, Microsoft’s Bing officially went live. Microsoft’s presence in the search industry had been steadily on the downfall, but since Bing and its massive marketing campaign, it has at last seen some growth.
Also in June, Less CSS was released by Alexis Sellier and Dmitry Fadeyev. It let’s you write CSS code with variables, operations and nested rules, then compile it into regular old CSS.
In July, the W3C confirmed that when the XHTML 2 team’s working charter expired at the end of the year, it would not be renewed. This allows more resource to go towards the development of HTML 5.
In October, Yahoo provided a somewhat fitting end to the decade with the closure of Geocities. Geocities was a lot of people’s first taste of publishing to the internet. Web publishing has come a long, long way since the days of Geocities’ glory in the late 90s.
End of the Noughties
So much has happened in the past 10 years. I doubt anyone in 1999 could have predicted where we would be now. It has to make you wonder where we’ll be come 2020!
If you had to choose one single event that affected the web design industry the most, what would it be?
For me, the web standards movement (Embodied in things like Jeffrey Zeldman’s book, the CSS Zen Garden and many other standards supporters) has had the most profound effect. Curious to hear what your choices will be!
PS – Paul Anthony from Web Ireland has written up a similar post, check it out if you want to see even more events from the decade!
Enjoy this post? You should follow me on Twitter!
About the Author
Michael Martin
Michael Martin is the founder of Pro Blog Design. He works as a freelance web designer, loves WordPress, and has an unhealthy addiction to smilies.
Fantastic overview, Michael!
Glad you enjoyed it Jeff! :D
You sure do know what youre talking about. Man, this blog is just great!
Yes, really interesting !
Such a great summary!! Thanks for sharing!!!
It`s a great overview, Michael!
Great summary – we live in exciting times :)
Couldn’t agree more Lisa, can’t wait to see what happens next! :D
Hey Michael,
Really fun article. I use and am a fan of the 960gs, but to put in the same list as facebook being launched and the other design moments…I don’t know. My vote is for jQuery. Its taking over most uses of Flash and keeps getting better and better.
That’s true Adam, it definitely wasn’t on the same scale. I wanted to keep things relevant to designers though, so when I added in the arrival of JavaScript frameworks, it seemed fair enough to include CSS frameworks as well (JQuery and 960.gs seem to be the 2 most popular, that’s why I picked them in particular :) )
But all in all, lol, you’re definitely right that it’s not quite on the same scale as most of the other things here :D
Wow … facebook was made in 2004 and now has, alexa rank 2. And I also agree .. with “In October, Google purchased YouTube for $ 1.65 billion. That story has inspired countless other web startups.” Inspired me too:)
Thanks for this great article
Likewise Eko! Someday we’ll top that and others can be inspired by us! ;)
Wow, Michael! What a fun article to read. I have to admit that there were many things I had either never heard of or just had extremely marginal knowledge about. But there are so many things listed that I have used or still use frequently. We’ve come a long way in just 10 years that it really does make you wonder how primitive what we enjoy now will seem in 2020. Thanks for a neat presentation of such thoroughly researched material.
Glad you liked it Rob! Some of them are definitely better known than others, and some I suppose are just plain old now (I was surprised to find that Friendster is still around!).
any prediction for next years..??
Hard to say; HTML5 and yet more CSS3 are going to be big, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end of the next decade, we were still having to take care of backwards compatibility to CSS2 and HTML4.
I think the best success stories will continue to come from startups that appear out of nowhere. That’s because everything really is changing at the minute, so there is so much room for creative ideas!
The mobile market is the obvious example of things progressing, but even webapps could start to enjoy a much greater popularity (Especially if Chrome OS goes well! :) )
Cleverly put together… very clever.
I came in to web design when CSS divs were taking over from tables for page layout so I was lucky.
I spent hours reading the articles on A List Apart… didn’t understand many but I guessed they were cutting edge.
Didn’t realise how IE6 would make a grown man cry when your website fell apart in front of the client.
The one I always forgot was left/right floated divs with left/right margin got their margins doubled and the client got float drop… fantastic.
Now I’m getting moving with WordPress… the web has come a long way and most of us have come a long way.
Unfortunately IE6 is still the spectre at the feast.
lol Keith, I underestimated just how stressful IE6 could make life as well!
I think we were all the same with CSS issues when we started out. I remember getting so frustrated with floats just like you said because they wouldn’t line up (or they did in one browser but not in another!). Even when I first fixed them, I couldn’t say I fully understood what I’d done!
But I guess that overtime we learn from those mistakes, thankfully…. :D
Interesting overview! I learned a lot of new things. Thank you Michael.
Welcome Tomas! I learned quite a few new things as well as I wrote it! :D
Nice overview! I still remember when i first published online through Geocities and that my first community was built on the phpbb framework. Very funny. Thanks for sharing Michael.
lol, good times! My first community was built on Invisionfree.com, but they took a real nosedive a few years ago so they definitely weren’t getting mentioned in the post! I was a big phpBB fan as well :D (Was so excited when phpBB3 Gold was finally released after so many years!)
Great post
thanks alot
Great article with fun contents!
Can’t wait to see what’s prepared for us all this year ;-)
Thanks for sharing Michael.
Haha, hopefully there’ll be a few more things worth reading! I’ll do my best ;)
Very cool post!!!
Yeah correct I believe you. Thank you for sharing.
Awesome rundown, thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.
I felt electricity running through my body from the excitement of reading your summary. I remember the experience of the decade before as well it was very thrilling. So yes, you are right what about 2020? I ask now that my most brilliant future self will come and visit me and give me a great summary of the decade in front of us and what I most need to know about it, web design wise! I appreciate your summary.
Haha, well in that case I want your future-self to come and tell me it all right after it’s done telling you! :D
Great overview – takes me back – Can’t believe it’s been 5 years since Adobe purchased Macromedia – I still remember the sense of dread… It didn’t work out so badly though.
Likewise. I always hated PDFs so other than Photoshop, I wasn’t too sure what Adobe’s strengths were! It has worked out quite nicely so far though :)
This is a really unique post man! I’ve never seen anything like it, but I really like your idea keep up the great work.
Great overview! But shouldn’t Twitter be part of this list?
It is, just under a slightly different name! Check out 2006 :)
This was a very entertaining reminder of nearly ALL my web design years. I’d say it was around 2000 when I ultimately got interested in the field, and with the whole online scene. Fantastic overview, brought back memories. :)
Sometime I think it takes a list like this to make you realise how much the internet has developed, the worrying thing is what will it be like in a further 10 years?
Great over view I remember the experience of the decade before as well it was very thrilling. So yes, you are right what about 2020?my first community was built on the phpbb framework. Very funny. Thanks for sharing Michael.
Great overview.. Michael!
WOW !
Interesting…
:)
“Internet Explorer 6. At least now, we can start to say goodbye.”
I can’t wait foe the day Microsoft shuts this down, every web designer will be celebrating on that day!
I agree the sooner the better! I still have a client in local government that use IE6 and like you say will be celebrating with a big party when they upgrade.
Wow fantastic and nostaligic time line!
Web design has come on leaps and bounds in the last 10 years! Thank heavens for the W3C and web standards, wordpress and the death of geocities. The next 10 years will hopefully continue the web standards trend and also push forwards with HTML5, CSS3 and open video formats.
It’s suprising to see that sites like facebook en youtube are so young and yet so popular :-o
Hopefully the next decade will be all about web standards and usability, and luckily I seem to notice a trend towards this recently as developers and businesses alike seem to be noticing the benefits.
Hey, just wanted to say that this was an excellent article reflecting major advancements in today’s technology. I currently am in the process of getting my blog built up as it is geared towards anything science and technology. And I must say just being able to live in the past 10 years I have seen technology double and triple its growth rate. It is just amazing to think what will be like in 10, 20, 30 or 100 years! Well, keep up the great work! I have enjoyed many resources here as they’ve helped me a great deal in making my attempt at building my website theme!
Can you believe the evolution of all of these sites! The next 10 years, wait, the next 5 years are going to bring a lot of exciting new sites, features and technologies!
Great article can’t believe how much has changed in a decade
It is amazing how fast the time goes by, I didn’t realize it was 6 years since Facebook was created.
Great post
thanks alot
Very informative, and a good afternoon read
Whaw, so much has happened within such a sort time. Cant wait to see what is going to happen in the next 10years time.
This is amazing the evolution of what is going on. With technology we will not have to wait much longer for more exciting features and technologies.
Someone should do a site dedicated to stuff like this, like History of the web. and have all the highlights since it boomed, like yahoo chat rooms till now. :) and let users expand it.
Sort of like a social wiki but just arround one area.
Loved this review of the decade. A good trip down memory lane. I’m excited to see how videos on the web develop over the next couplpe of years!
nice overview! I think in the next decade the changes will be faster still. Thank you Michael.
What does everything think the most influential year was for the web? Or are they all on a par?
Seems hard to imagine the world without youtube and facebook. But wordpress is my favourite.
dustries. In the previous 2 or 3 years, the Dot-Com Bubble was a time of rapid gr
I put my first page on geocities several years ago. I think you have to remeber your number and virtual village. Web address was something like: geocities.com/village/your_number. I allways have to look in my notes to find adress, it was hard to remeber (for me at least :))
Interesting following. Very fun to see the progression.
thanks michael..
Yeah, because of the existence of android, apple nowadays are threaten in the market.
Good to hear you shared this post, a lot to do with web designing, brilliant ideas.
thanks michael..Good to hear you shared this post, a lot to do with web designing, brilliant ideas.nice overview! I think in the next decade the changes will be faster still. Thank you Michael.
Thank! for sharing
I spent hours reading the articles on A List Apart… didn’t understand tenant Screening many but I guessed they were cutting edge.
I wanted to keep things relevant to designers though, so when I added in the arrival tenant Screening of JavaScript frameworks, it seemed fair enough to include CSS frameworks
Good to hear you shared this post, a lot to do with tenant Screening web designing, brilliant ideas.nice overview! I think in the next decade the changes will be faster still.
This site is really interesting. You bring up some great points about your article… .. Thanks for the great information about website design.. It is my first time here in this site so good job…
It’s suprising to see that sites like facebook en youtube are so young and yet so popular :-o
What a decade it’s been! I think the next X will be huge!!!!
Great post. Thank you for sharing it with us. I really enjoyed reading it.
Agree. Great post and great compelation of web design events. Quite interesting to see the chain of events.
Nice overview, I learned a lot of new things..
Thanks for the info,,, I love it
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Just loved the April’s Fools day joke about the Gmail insane 1GB free storage size.
Who would fall for such an absurd story? =P
Nice overview and great presentation.
Agree with everyone here. Great post.
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I spent hours reading the articles on A List Apart
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Michael, Nice thoughts on web designing. Nowadays, web designers and users can understand the importance of the creative web design and so that year by year there is lot of improvement in web designing.
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I also agree with everyone here, fantastic overview.
Thanks Michael!
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