Web design has evolved considerably since the mid to late-1990s when the top sites included aol.com, netscape.com and yahoo.com. Common navigation and organization elements included the top search bar, graphic site navigation and text-based directory. There were 9,000,000 sites by the end of that decade.
Between 2000 and 2005, the top sites were apple.com, msn.com, ebay.com, napster.com, adobe.com and microsoft.com. This stretch saw the rise of multiple navigation options—and common navigation and organization elements included the search bar, top navigation tab and left bar categories. The period between 2006 and 2012 saw the growing popularization of login screens. Common navigation and organization elements consisted of top navigation tabs, login screen and landing page. Mobile web design gained importance during these years. The top sites included reddit.com, google.com and craigslist.org.
This year, web design is very much about curation and limited navigation. Common navigation and organization elements include the login screen, landing page and search box. There are now over 250,000,000 sites—and some of the top ones are facbook.com, bing.com, wikipedia.com, twitter.com, wordpress.com, linkedin.com and tumblr.com.
Which web browser do you use the most? Google Chrome has surpassed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser.
To learn more about the history of web design, take a look at the infographic below presented by Web Design Degree Center.
