Thirteen years ago, in 1994, Yahoo! had just launched. Can you imagine the internet now without a major search engine like Yahoo! or Google to help? There is so much more content, so many more sites, and so much more stuff in general on the internet that we cannot get by without these tools now.

Most websites back then were text based, with no Flash, and virtually no plug-ins. They were an exchange of educational information only. Now you can see and buy almost anything on the web. With the advent of sites such as YouTube, MySpace, EBay, and Amazon the sky is the limit. Now we are no longer concerned with just text and FTP, we have a whole myriad of plug-ins to integrate to make a site truly great. So, while design standards such as clean lines, clear flow, and consistency have stayed the same, the back end has changed considerably. Chat rooms, Shopping Carts, Email Databases, games, videos, television and basically anything a good programmer can think up can go into the making of a site that users will feel happy using and returning to time and again. That’s a lot to think about!

So, good luck to all you surfers out there! There’s a lot of crap to wade through, but a ton of fun new and innovative things happening all the time.

[Some ideas in this article were taken from an article on BBC News. A Decade of Good Website Design by Mark Ward, Tuesday, 7 December 2004, with usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen for the BBC World Service Programme. To read more visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4061093.stm]