Growth of Website Designing Industry

Ever since the concept of websites came into being in the early 1990's, web designers have been continually shaping and reshaping the way websites look. During the early stages, websites were entirely text-based, with scarcely any images and very little layout except for headings and paragraphs. However, as the web design industry advanced, we began to see table-based designs, Flash, and finally CSS-based designs. To those who may be unaware, Tim Berners-Lee published the first website in August 1991 but it was nothing more than a simple, text-based page with a couple of links. A web page from 1992 had a dozen or so links, and its objective was to merely let all know what the World Wide Web was all about. All web pages looked similar and they were all entirely text-based and had a single-column design with inline links.

Interestingly, the initial versions of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) enabled only basic content structure: headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), paragraphs (<p>), and links allowed for (<a>). The later versions of HTML however allowed the addition of images (<img>) to pages, and eventually support for tables (<table>) got added. During the year 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was formed, and this consortium set HTML as the standard for marking up web pages. This nearly prevented any individual organization from building a proprietary browser and programming language. The W3C continues to set the standards for open web markup and programming languages (such as JavaScript).

Over the decades since inception in the mid 1990s, web design and development has been one of the most rapidly growing industries in the world. In fact, during1995 there were fewer than 1,000 web development companies in the United States, but a decade hence there are now over 30,000 such companies in the U.S. alone.

Web development is now a broad term and can range from developing the simplest static single page containing plain text to the most complicated web-based internet applications, e-businesses, social networking sites etc. One of the foremost reasons that has influenced this growth of web design industry is the decline of costs for creating and managing a website.

The World Wide Web has become an effective tool for interaction, communication and business growth. Website development has ceased to be costly and there are a large number of small web developers who are offering their services at affordable rates. The growth of the web design industry was fuelled by companies using the Web as a business tool to sell their goods or services. The emergence of electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been a plus point to the growth of the Web design industry. E-commerce sites have dramatically altered the way people buy or sell goods, making trading a lot easier and convenient than ever before.

Another classic example of transformation led by web development is the ability to create blogs. Open source content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla!, Drupal, XOOPS, and TYPO3 and enterprise content management systems such as Alfresco have carried web development into new spheres of interactive communication.

Social networking Websites such as Facebook and Twitter offer users a platform to freely communicate and this is also changing e-commerce through the number of hits and online advertisement. Advertising on the web is also developing into a multi-million dollar industry, as advertisements in some form or another are invariably available on every page of a website.

Today, many web development companies in UAE have well-trained and skilled professionals and offer excellent services and have earned reputation around the world. With competition getting fiercer by the day and there being a proliferation of websites, effective SEO practices are also becoming necessary. It is a fact that online UAE businesses and their unique Arabic web designs command a lot of attention and respect from Internet visitors.