Advertisers took advantage of the advanced coding capabilities to direct their products or services towards online audiences in a much more direct way. Though pop-up windows, movie clips that start automatically, or interactive banner advertisements, businesses consistently used website design as the tool to communicate their messages. As the Internet allows for new features, businesses quickly adapt: for example, now advertisers are able to force viewers to watch brief commercials on portals such as YouTube before the actual video will play. Similarly, some websites will not allow one to see the page until they answer a quiz with questions based on a preceding advertisement.
This idea illustrates the symbiotic relationship between commercial web design and businesses. In order to advertise their product or service to generate revenue, they must use design wisely to reach their goals; sometimes they may call for designers to change the composition of the site as a whole, however, to accommodate the message. 
Thus, the design of commercial websites today is evidently different from that of non-revenue generating pages, thanks to the evolution of web capabilities and the drive of companies to create profit any way they can.
But before one can evaluate these choices for both genres of websites, let us attempt to succinctly understand one possible definition of design. In “Graphic Design: Fine Art of Social Science?” author Jorge Frascara claims, “graphic design is the activity that organizes visual communication in society” (28). It may then be fitting to see graphic design as an elegant solution to complex problems: it can be the box that packages information and presents it to an audience, or the unending process that unifies ideas and offers them for critique and review by the user. In fact, designer Quentin Newark agrees with this notion, calling design as a whole a “servant of its content.” He states that design is “typefaces, images, and the arrangement of these: it is nothing without a content to articulate” (20). Though this is true, Frascara takes that definition one step further: “the solution to a client’s needs is not the production of visual communication; it is the modification of people’s attitudes or abilities in one way or another. This modification can be a change…, a reinforcement…, or a facilitation…” (31). This concept pushes the reader to dive further into the backbone of design. According to Frascara, graphic design does in fact offer solutions and satisfy needs, but it also renders change. Without that change or inspiration on another human, graphic design is not truly design, but purely art. 
For the realm of all websites, this holds a large deal of truth. Unless one is able to keep one’s audience attracted to a site long enough to fulfill the goal, be it actively selling an item or passively offering information, then the website as a whole is useless. The trends of today’s World Wide Web showcase that designers are fighting more than ever to stand out from the crowd of ineffective design and explore options that work and content that does not. 