How One Norfolk Website Design Company Is Anticipating The Next Internet Revolution
The Norfolk website design company which I work alongside has seen a great many changes in the way websites are designed, built and used. Many of those changes are short lived, amounting to little more than passing fads, fashionable one minute and abandoned the next. Other changes are longer lasting however, and many of these denote the changing path along which web technology has been travelling.
For example, there were many websites for a time which decided that flashy page openers and closers were a good idea. For one awful period in the internet's history page transitions seemed to be dish of the day. There are still a few websites which employ this method, though I can't seem to think of any particularly good reasons why a company would want to use such fads. After all, what's a page transition other than a delay? There seems little point in delaying your visitors seeing your website.
The problem is that we have becoming incredibly demanding when we use the web. Google's query results demonstrate just how obsessed we are with getting results now - very often seeing millions, sometimes billions, of results in under a second. That's impressive computing power, but how often do we stop to think about just how fast the technology is? Very rarely, and almost certainly a good deal less often than we moan and drum our fingers as we're forced to wait a couple of seconds for the data to appear.
The fact that we get impatient if we have to wait for more than a few seconds for the equivalent of a book, a section from an encyclopaedia, a video or a game to appear on our screens having travelled thousands of miles round the planet at our command just emphasises how demanding we have become!
Website design has experienced many odd experiments, page transitions being one - custom mouse cursors being another - but overall the changes which have occurred, and which our Norfolk website design company has witnessed, have been ones which enable faster and more reliable access to information.
I'm not talking about broadband here - although few would doubt the benefits of that. But the actual technology powering websites has become faster. This in itself may not surprise or impress many visitors, but as website designers we are constantly amazed at the new ways in which it is possible to integrate more and more complex elements in a seamless and efficient package.
Many web designers used to be programmers, and today those with this kind of background are feeling very much at home, as increasingly this is what website development is largely about. There are the graphics, the interactions, the icons, the text and the navigation structures of course, but these are largely icing on the cake in terms of the core fundamental aspects of a good, well designed website. You can dress a document up all you like, but if it's badly programmed it will simply become ignored and avoided by users and search engines alike.
The fact that, as a web designer, I would be concerned about being ignored or shunned by the search engines is another aspect of web technology which, until a few years ago, few people could have seen coming. Of course, search engines were always going to become necessary, but perhaps few imagined, or dared to imagine just how soon that day would be. The fact that we went from a handful of websites to billions of websites in under two decades just goes to show how much we have taken this technology into our lives.
The Norfolk web design company I work with is not alone in anticipating the current web evolution to continue, integrating the worlds of offline software and online data sharing even more closely. When you buy a software package, you know that it will require updating at intervals, that the help files may be added to, extra tutorials released and even add-ons made available.
But do you want to have to keep opening a separate program - your web browser, navigating to the right site, finding out whether updates are available, locating them, downloading them and installing them? No, you expect the software to be smart enough to do all that for itself. This clearly demonstrates the way we now have begun to anticipate and expect our offline software to be smarter, and more able to integrate itself with the technology of the internet.
But when it comes to web design Norwich has not yet seen the conclusion of this evolution - if there ever could be such a thing as a conclusion to any form of evolution, since by default the term suggests ongoing change and improvement. But since our offline software has become so much more integrated with the online world, it is highly probable that we will see the online world becoming ever more closely linked to facilities, utilities and services which we would normally expect to see offline. The border between these two worlds is coming down, and it won't just be my Norfolk website design company that will be building the bridges across between the two.
