How the Web Has Changed, and Why You Should Too

Boy has the Internet changed over the years. It’s been around long enough that old-timers can now say “back in my day, the web was….” and then tell how they had to walk eight miles barefoot through five feet of snow to get to a PC, uphill, both ways.

If you look up the history of the Internet, you’ll find its roots go all the way back to the 1950’s, but most will settle for 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee (sorry, it’s now SIR Tim Berners-Lee) created the World Wide Web, and became a very wealthy fellow.

Although all you upwardly-mobile young urban professionals flocking to the high-tech Meccas of Colorado might be too young to remember the early days of the Internet, rest assured it was somewhat, er, primitive.

But nowadays Internet technology changes at the speed of an electron. Heck, people these days laugh at websites that are only a few years old. It’s very important to your image, and your marketing strategy, to keep your site up to date. Here’s a brief look at how PCs and the Internet have changed over the decades.

• • Screen size. Way back in the 90’s the standard screen was 640 pixels wide, and web designers would create websites to fit the screen. Today they can be as wide as 3,000 pixels, and if you have an older site, it can look pretty funny on a screen it’s too small for. Have you ever seen a website that was created circa 2002 and still lives? It looks archaic, and people giggle at it.

 

• • Computer speeds. In 1990, a smokin’ PC was 25MHz with 12Mb of RAM and 400Mb of disk space. Can you imagine? Today a moderately priced laptop has 2.1GHz, 8GB and 640GB respectively. Moore’s Law, depending on which version you read, states that computer performance will double every two years. Can your website keep up? Or will people curse it for being so slow, and maybe go to a competitor’s site?

 

• • Browsers. Back in the day, there was a web browser called Mosaic. It is credited with making the Internet popular, because it was user-friendly and it worked pretty well. It died in the late 90’s, but it’s spirit lives on in today’s most-used browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, and many more. Windows 10 is introducing a new browser called Microsoft Edge to replace the venerable Internet Explorer. Making sure your site is optimized for all the different browsers potential customers could be exploring it with is essential.

 

Bottom line, rapid changes in technology are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and if your website doesn’t keep up, well, you can be sure that your competitor’s will. Optimize your site with a Denver web design team that works in the future.

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