By 1995, the National Science Foundation started charging fees to register domains, excluding only educational and governmental websites (Moschovitis 39). Because of the ability of anyone to buy an address, this event marks the rapid expansion and commercialization of the Internet. Advertisers quickly embraced this idea, purchasing space for advertisements on pages to try to attract their target audiences through yet another medium. The general public, on the other hand, was also investing money into the web by signing up accounts with service providers such as American On-line. By 1999, Wi-Fi was introduced, spelling out increased accessibility to the Internet and an even greater number of people utilizing it (Moschovitis 54).
Following these landmark events, the innovations of the Internet rapidly followed to help it evolve into the portal we know it as today. Broadband and DSL access, faster loading times, enhanced Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) all help to both allow the user to view sites while making the experience more memorable and beautiful.
But in order to achieve the aesthetically pleasing look that many pages have today, one must acknowledge the somewhat embarrassing design of the earliest websites.
Design was highly limited in the early 1990s in many ways. Because the average user’s computer display was often somewhat crude and incapable of displaying high-resolution images, a wide breadth of colors, or certain sizes of web elements, designers tended to stay conservative: more often than not, sites had characteristic white backgrounds, blue underlined hyperlinks, fairly large-set black Times New Roman text, and very few static images. The elements were usually stacked one on top of the other in an extreme vertical fashion, which caused text to scroll very far across the page, sometimes entire screen spans from right to left. Furthermore, because designers had little control or knowledge of what fonts their audiences’ computers had loaded in the system, they were limited to a small handful of “safe” fonts, such as Times New Roman or Arial. It was thus an era of design to the lowest common denominator.
As the years progressed, each change to how HTML was interpreted or what certain browsers could handle allowed for increased artistic freedom. Through multimedia and JavaScript, designers were able to create dynamic, albeit limited, content to engage the user through pop-ups, menus, navigation, animations, and sound bytes. The trend that now emerged, however, was just as unappetizing as its predecessor: pages became so busy with irrelevant content that browsing the site could become a chore. Colors often clashed or caused type to be unreadable on tiled, patterned backgrounds. This era could seem to the nostalgic designer as a time where artists were doing everything the web would allow, not because they thought the end result was necessarily beautiful, but because they could, and the experimentation itself seemed to suggest sophistication.
Those capabilities were very important as they helped pave the way for the future. 