Musings on web development

On Friday James and I attended a seminar in London on University Websites. I found the seminar most interesting and gave me plenty of food for thought. It made me consider how web development has changed over the years and also what a website itself is has changed.

When I started in web development way back in 1995 it was very different out there, Netscape had just gone beta with v2.0 and frames were set to revolutionise the embryonic industry. Very few people were developing commercial websites back then and tools were scarce. Everything had to be created from scratch. Websites tended to be isolated entities which did not interact with each other, and very little with the user.

But now its very different, websites can be created with very little original code, content management systems can handle the site structure and HTML and third-party applications can add functionality. Websites are more than just pages of text and graphics now, they have video, interaction, client and server side functionality. Information and functionality can now be taken from other sites and used to enhance our own site (an example being RSS feeds - something we had on the old site but didn't implement on the "new" one).

A quote from the seminar I found most illuminating, "your website isn't your web presence", and indeed it isn't anymore. That web presence has spread outside of your control too, to sites like Wikipedia and Facebook. Its an online experience perhaps we are now building, so perhaps the term "web developer" is dead and we should now be called "online experience facilitators".