The evolution of web design/development

Years ago....lets say around 10 to 15 years ago, I started getting interested in making web pages. Yes, that's right web pages...because web sites weren't really that popular for people who wanted simple sites. I would make sites for friends, co-workers and occasionally random people that heard of me through others. I first learn web design/development on Front Page, messing around to get what I want. I used FRAMES, which is like coding in 3 different browsers.

http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

There were marquees, music that played automatically when the site loaded and awful color schemes. But at the time, that was the technology. 

When I started using Dreamweaver, the standard was tables to align everything. Tables weren't just used for relaying spreadsheet like data, they were used for laying out the whole site. I still remember some of that code. The hard part was figuring out how many rows and columns your picture would take up. Then CSS came along. The only downside was that you had to design everything based on 1 screen size, not 20 different screen sizes. There weren't cell phones that had internet access yet, so responsive design wasn't necessary. So, designers took a 1 size fit all approach. As the screen sizes changed and got bigger, developers would accommodate this by only utilizing a specific size of the screen.  This became more obvious as you would see gaps of unused space around the design. This is still pretty standard as older sites are still quite functional and people don't see the need to update the design.

As I learned some C# programming, I started using Visual studio. Visual Studio has a wysiwyg interface just like dreamweaver. This is about the time that CSS became popular as a way of displaying a site. It was still popular to use images for non web-safe fonts. Most of your buttons were images as well, as no one knew how to turn a div into a button yet. Basic css was about positioning and we were told that once DIVs became normal that it was bad practice to use tables for layout as you could position divs anywhere on the page with css. 

Now we are into minimalistic design that utilizes the whole screen and resizes based on the screen size. We can use web fonts or a font that we have on our computer that we can upload to the server. We can play movies in the background of our site. We can make divs that have a colored background, rounded edges and can use jQuery to make them function just like a button. 

We sure have come a long way in website design and development.