Funny Facts About Web Design

Musings and Amusings About Web Design

You can see an additional, updated post here: Funny Facts About Web Design 2016

When you stop to think about designing websites, unless a site is designed to be humorous, you wouldn’t think there is much about web design that is funny. However, when you take a look at website design from the right perspective, especially when comparing today’s website designs to historical (hysterical?) ones, you’ll find there are quite a few things that are quite funny indeed.

For example:

Code

Website design used to be all hand-coded. If you didn’t fully understand HTML, Perl and other web intensive languages, you were lost. Today, web design packages can take care of all the coding for you. which means you can put together complete, engaging and fully interactive websites without entering a single line of code.

Speed

With modems and other low-speed internet connections, building a fast website meant minimizing graphics and photos and such luxuries as videos were essentially impossible. Also, with hosting space and bandwidth limitations, a “large” website was expensive. Now, with virtually everyone connecting to the internet with a broadband connection of some type and with huge bandwidth backbones and the ability to cross-link to sites such as YouTube, leveraging video and high definition photography into your website is a snap without worrying about speed or size issues.

Storage

Speaking of hosting issues, bandwidth and storage were expensive. Storage space was limited, sometimes being as little as 10 megabytes and sites that required lots of bandwidth because of the volume of visitors could run up thousands of dollars a month in bandwidth fees. Today, you can get a complete hosting solution with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited e-mails and unlimited storage for under $5 a month.

Time

Designing and building websites used to take forever to do. Between coding, manipulating photos and graphics to minimize page load times and other website optimizations to have a fast, great looking site, a designer could spend days on one page. This meant completing a complex website could actually run into the weeks or even months category. With high-speed internet connectivity and all the great web design tools and resources available today, building a great looking, well rounded website can be fully completed in an evening.

Maintenance

Website maintenance and changes could take forever as well. Having to re-code dozens of pages, manipulating new photos and graphics and getting everything to look “perfect” could take almost as long to do as building a new website. Tools such as website designer packages, pre-made templates and modular designs means you can totally do a make-over on a website in a matter of a few mouse clicks today.

When you take a look at what you used to have to do for building websites versus what little you really have to do today, taking a look at all the expenses, all the hassles and all the hoops you had to do in the past is, without a doubt, truly funny. While there are still hoops you have to jump through today, especially with community connectivity with blogs and social media such as Facebook and Twitter and SEO evolution to consider, when you compare it to what you had to do in the past, the humor factor definitely comes into play.

Do you have any funny facts comparing old web design to new? Share in the comments section below!