Musing on web development

(A comment piece i wrote for another blog a couple of years ago, re-published here with a few amendments. Re-cycling is good yeah?)

A while ago I attended a seminar in London on University Websites. The seminar was most interesting and gave me plenty of food for thought (which is how it should be done). 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 a very different industry (such that it was) 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. Pretty much everything had to be created from scratch. I even had to write my own on-line tool to convert decimal values to hex! 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 your own site (an example being RSS feeds).

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 and a myriad of other social media sites. Its an on-line experience perhaps we are now building using social media tools, so perhaps the term "web developer" is dead and we should now be called "on-line experience facilitators".