Before 15-20 years ago when all the Internet boom was happening, we had a very poor choice of “CMS” systems. Moreover, I can’t remember any of them present at that time. What we had was a pure and simple HTML code and a notepad to write our code on. Designing a website at that time took months and months on the end and it was very pricey. Looking back, those web-pages looked more like the Las Vegas “Strip” back in early 60’s. Take a look at these samples below…
We have evolved…
Quite a lot in last 20 years. Google has become an absolute leader in the search field, and completely devastated MSN Search, Yahoo, Altavista, HotBot, Lycos and many others. I remember the days when in if you choose Yahoo to search for a “chocolate chip cookies” you would get some sort of a rubbish with links to the adult sites. For the same query on another engine the gardening and flowers would pop up as a search result. So we had to jump from one SE to another in order to get the relevant results.
As Google has started plowing the road for better and more relevant search results, web designers started getting more and more tools of the trade available at their fingertips. One of the first was the Dreamweaver by Macromedia back in 1997 that has shown some serious potential in speeding up website development. Macromedia was later acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.
With the rise of the “Search” the website development tools have become a must for every digital web designer out there. In order to succeed, web designers had to jump on the wagon and learn new skills and practices which had become an industry standards.
WordPress…
Is by far the most used CMS platform today. Unlike 20 years ago, you don’t have to be a web designer, programmer or a script kiddie in order to make a perfectly looking DYI website. A friend of mine, which I’m dedicating this post to, is a carpenter by trade who has been living in USA until 2011, then permanently relocated to Croatia, has absolutely no formal web design education, yet he has put together this beautiful website about his swimming pool business in Croatia. I have asked him how long it took him to put it all together and he told me that for initial website with 12 pages and basic photo gallery took him one weekend. Please take a look at bazenirijeka.com and see for yourself. CMS’s use of plugins is a revolutionary step towards the simplicity of the website designing and general development. I am very confident that the future brings even more simple ways and tools for website designers and developers.