There was a point in time when the internet was an alien place and the idea of building a website was an overwhelmingly technical and time-consuming process. Thankfully like any invention with the passage of time, things become more accessible and achievable for the general public.
To see how we have gotten to this point in time, where anyone (yes anyone!) can build a website in minutes, let’s take a little walk through history to see how we got here.
What is a website?
According to the Oxford Dictionary, a website is –
a set of related web pages located under a single domain name, typically produced by a single person or organization.
Who Created the first website?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a British computer scientist. After graduating from Oxford University he became a software engineer at the CERN Institute, one of the largest scientific research centres in the world.
Berners-Lee noted that the many scientists that visited the facility did not have the ability to easily share information between them. He came up with a vision, for what would become the web, called “Information Managements: A Proposal.” It was largely written off by his boss at the time, but even though it was not officially a CERN project he was given time to develop the idea.
He developed the building blocks of the internet, which remain to this day –
- HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – the formatting language of the internet
- URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) – More commonly known as a URL
- HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) – This allows us to access resources for all across the web.
- First Web Page Editor
- First Web Server
When was the first website created?
All of this hard work led to the first website being launched internally to CERN at the end of 1990 and to the rest of the world in 1991.
A very simple text-only design, The website is still available for viewing in its original form to this day.
You can click on the image below to go and check it out for yourself.
And thankfully, for those of us that followed, Berners-Lee and other advocates ensured that CERN would allow the technology to remain available, for free, to everyone, FOREVER.
Website Evolution…
We have come a long way since the original, static, non-interactive website.
So let’s take a little trip through time.
Now…
I know that I have thrown a lot of technical jargon around so far but I am a big believer that you need to see where you have been to appreciate where you are now.
The first websites would have taken multiple people writing thousands of individual lines of code all to achieve a very basic design.
Today you can achieve a beautiful, fully functional, interactive website in minutes.
Check out the video below to see just how easy the process can be when you have access to the right tools.
So as you can see with the right tools the process of building a website is now a very simple process. One that ANYONE can achieve.
If you want to learn how to tackle this challenge yourself.
Click here to learn all of that and much more!!
If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below.