The Technology That Has Driven the Evolution of Business Websites
Business websites are incredibly important tools. A huge amount of custom and communication is routed through a company’s site and innovative designers are always looking to offer clients new ways of drawing traffic and gaining loyal customers. Here is some of the technology that has changed web design for businesses.
The Proliferation of Broadband
During the web 1.0 era, when most internet users were reliant upon dial up broadband, business websites would either contain very little or take a long time to load. Nothing was more frustrating than a website full of animations and images loading pixel by pixel.
In the year 2000, the first broadband internet connections were trialed in the United Kingdom. Broadband internet was faster and more reliable than dial up and had the potential to increase capability exponentially. This potential for exponential home internet speed increase has led to one of the biggest developments in web design: websites can include huge quantities of information and stylish aesthetics without making them impossible to browse. Depending on who you ask, this has led to a wonderful proliferation of interesting website designs or a glut of overstuffed, feature heavy monstrosities. In recent years there has been a backlash against overstuffed, information heavy websites. Less, as they say, is more. This website designer in Coventry utilizes functional, uncrowded design principles.
An Evolving Google Search Algorithm
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, did it fall at all? This oft’ repeated proverbial saying rings true when you consider the impact of a good business website. Even a great website is near enough useless to any organization if potential customers and collaborators never find it.
The huge majority of online inquiries for services are made through the Google search engine. Google uses a regularly updated algorithm to ‘rank’ search results by relevance using a number of criteria. Web designers are well aware of this and change the content of websites in order to maximize the likelihood that potential customers will find their client’s page. This Search Engine Optimization has been a driving factor in the constant evolution of business websites as companies work tirelessly to improve their rankings. When Google’s algorithm is updated, it is possible to see large scale changes to well-run business websites.
Remote Database Servers
Businesses use data to develop strategy far more than at any time in the past. One of the ways in which businesses gather this data is through their websites. Websites are now designed to harvest all sorts of legally available data from visitors. From a business perspective there is one major issue with all of this collection: where can you store what you have collected? On-site servers are expensive, hot and require specialist maintenance. The recent explosion of off-site cloud-based servers has allowed businesses to disregard any fear of ‘running out of space’. The idea that a business can collect and analyze as much data as it wants has influenced the data capture practices associated with web design.
