The Evolution Of Website Production Methods

Doing research, communicating and other basic things used to be either extremely time consuming or expensive. One thing changed that greatly: the invention of the website.

Thanks to search sites, research is much faster and simpler than it used to be. There is no need to spend hours poring through card catalogs or their computerized equivalents. With the rise of latent semantic indexing (LSI), you don't even have to guess the exact way something is worded. Just type the phrase into Google, and the search engine will return results that are fairly close as well as exactly matching.

Sites also make communicating much easier. This is especially true for long distance conversation. Talking to someone on the other side of the world no longer results in eye-popping phone bills. Just get on a forum and make a post or send a private message, and someone in India or the UK can respond without it costing a thing. This doesn't even require you to pay for an internet connection if you use a library or school computer that you have free access to.

When the World Wide Web was new, it was hard for the average person to put up a website. Putting up even basic pages required learning HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, setting up hosting through interfaces that weren't always user-friendly and then spreading the URL through inefficient advertising methods.

Soon, this process was somewhat simplified by hosts who offered WYSIWYG editors. The initials mean "what you see is what you get," but with early versions, what you saw in the editing screen was often worlds away from what you really got. Needless to say, most early sites were either very simple or very ugly.

Fortunately, various individuals, non-profit groups and for-profit companies saw the potential market in making things even easier. One of the first decent WYSIWYG software programs was Dreamweaver. It was, and still is, a very powerful program for making sites. Still, knowing HTML turned out to be essential for getting things exactly right. The ability to go in and override its automatically-generated code meant the difference between a site that looked merely okay and one that looked great.

With the advent of WordPress, everything changed. Thanks to templates made by excellent designers, it became easy to have a professional-looking site with just a few clicks. Adding and updating pages went from being confusing and tedious to being completely simple. Part of this simplicity results from programming that is actually fairly complex. With WordPress and other blogging software, the average user never needs to deal with the coding aspect. Putting up a post is as simple as typing a letter.

The ease of adding posts isn't the only thing that revolutionized sites and brought them to the masses. Adding a page to an old-fashioned "static" site also required updating all of the navigation. On a large site, this could amount to thousands of links that would need to be added. With blogging software, the new link is added automatically.

If you've been thinking of putting up a site, there is no reason not to do it with all of the options available today. Of course, it is still possible to make a static HTML site or use a WYSIWYG editor. However, unless you have a strong reason for using the old methods, you'll almost surely want to use blogging software. This way, you can be up and running in just a few clicks.

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