The internet is an evolving product. The earliest web pages were text and static images only, which took an extensive amount of time to load over slow, dial up connections. The language behind the web, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) had limited features, to link pages together and facilitate finding files. Asides from that, the internet birthed out of teletype machines and text based newsgroups. But the web as we know it today took several evolutions before it was as an obscure a hobby as having a HAM radio licence. Over time, however, the web evolved, as did the education access, including web design courses.

A web designer probably uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design software program, uploads files without thinking much about it, and makes the wireframes of their design in a sophisticated, GUI based graphic design software program. The can certainly still work on HTML in a text editor, but they also have graphical and design control elements, such as Div layers, which govern exact placement on a page of image elements and text, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), over arcing graphical and layout guidelines that allow style guidelines for an entire page to be part of a single document.

In the early 2000s, the most exciting thing in web design was tables. There were animated images, and in browser video players, but social media was a telephone and mobile phones were brick like objects that belonged to stock brokers. Over the course of the decade, despite an initial dot com boom caused by over investment in all things technical, progress marched forward.

Blogging, meaning an online journal, became a thing. Oversharing through web cameras was pioneered, and more and more people got online. Web design courses started being part of high school, rather than the bizarre province of nerdy autodidacts. Social media came to be, and email increasingly became a browser based endeavour, rather than under the control of a separate software client. Computer courses changed almost annually to keep up, and libraries house a legacy of progress with outdated software manuals. Several operating systems came and went, while new browsers pushed to the forefront.

From a web design perspective, screens got bigger, so pages changed in look, evolving from clunky tables to cleaner and sleeker displays. Blogs birthed blogging software that is now used as a content management system by many websites, while web design became a matter of front end looks and back end coding. Social media plugins, a term, incidentally that came into common use from a popular open source browser of less than a decade of age, are now integrated into many pages to keep users connected across websites in ways that

Valeria Stephens is a Copywriter at Higher Education Marketing, a leading Web marketing firm specializing in Google Analytics, Education Lead Generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Mobile SMS Alerts, Social Media Marketing and Pay Per Click Marketing, among other web marketing services and tools.