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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

The end of web design - and maybe the web itself

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

I have a cache of unfinished blog posts that I'll occasionally work on and ultimately finish. The 30-year anniversary of my web site is a fitting time to publish this one.

I've been building web sites since 1995 and doing it professionally since 1997. During that time, I've witnessed and worked through some dramatic changes in the field.

Web design itself has been in a sunset era for the past decade. It's heading towards being a lost art, and it may already be.

When I started in the field, 640x480 CRT monitors with a 256 color space were the norm. Netscape Navigator was the Windows browser of choice. A large percentage of online users came from the big dialup companies like AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve. The slow speeds of dialup and the relative difficulty of creating and/or scanning images meant web sites were typically text-heavy with very few graphics and photos. Layouts were mostly single-column with inline images, a state that this site's first iteration in 1995 was in.

Dialup speeds and monitor sizes slowly increased over the following years. In the professional design world, we built sites for the smallest monitors in widespread use - which meant 640-pixel wide fixed-width layouts until 1998 or so. We chose to not do "responsive" variable-width layouts. By 1998, the availability of flatbed scanners and more sophisticated software allowed for the efficient creation of web graphics, which the 56k modems of the day permitting sites to include more graphical elements.

It was 2000 when what I consider to be the "golden era" of web design began. By the year 2000, the vast majority of monitors were 1024x768 or larger. Accordingly, we adopted a 1000-pixel wide layout standard. A few years later, that increased to 1200 pixels wide. The higher modem speeds and the eventual proliferation of broadband internet access supported a healthy level of graphics in sites, and the design tools and hardware we had enabled efficient creation of just about anything we wanted.

During that "golden era", I designed all of my sites graphically in an Adobe Photoshop PSD file. Doing it that way meant that the sky was the limit. The freedom was there to create anything I wanted - lines, curves, gradients, fades, photos, photo cutouts, you name it. Once this layout and design was to the client's satisfaction, I would "slice up" the PSD file into rectangular elements and save them as JPEG images that could be seamlessly arranged in an HTML table around the site's content cells.

Good old tables! Even as CSS rose to prominence, I never abandoned using tables as the core layout structure for my sites. They always worked in every browser on any operating system with perfect alignment and consistency - there was no need to worry about the breaks and workarounds that CSS-only layouts required. I still use tables heavily today.

During this era, I had the most freedom to approach the work with creativity at possibly the best company to do this type of work for: CIS Internet in Scott Depot, West Virginia. It was truly enjoyable - I looked forward to going to work. Every site's creation was like painting on a canvas. I did most of my design work in the evenings with music playing.

But it was not to last. In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone. Since then, it's been all downhill from there for web design. The smartphone is the single most important development in our field.

By 2010, like most web development firms, we were creating abbreviated mobile versions of sites alongside the main desktop versions. Those mobile sites were typically bare-bones, mostly with only a couple of pages with general and contact information for the business or organization. By 2012, mobile use had exploded to the point that we had to begin designing the entire sites to either be mobile-compatible (responsive) or have the mobile versions contain the full content of the desktop sites. By 2015, we had gone mobile-first for everything: the main site had to not only work on a mobile device, but be optimized for it. The site's desktop appearance became less and less important.

This all meant that the old graphical element standard had to be abandoned. No more "painting" a site into existence on the Photoshop canvas. That creativity just isn't possible in a mobile-first world. Now that the smartphone has taken over, web design has become a lost art. Today's web sites have to be a simple arrangement of essentially pre-made, cookie-cutter elements. A small, touch-operated phone screen just can't support anything more than that.

I'm not completely out of the web design field, but it's a shell of its former self. It hasn't been the enjoyable art form that it used to be for a long time. Will we ever have another era that will support creative web design again? I can't see it happening, unless the world somehow abandons the smartphone and goes back to viewing online content on large-screen devices.

It's not just web design that is fading, it's the web itself. Social media has captured the attention of most users of the internet today. When one social media app or site fades, another takes its place. Less users are diverting any of their attention from those apps to visit web sites. And not just due to preference, the social media companies actively suppress links to outside sites. This site's traffic has shown this decline: it's gone from 2,000 visitors a day during the spring and summer storm seasons to less than 400. In 2023, stormhighway.com's traffic dipped below 200 pageviews in a day for the first time since shortly after its debut and rapid takeoff in 1995.

On another vestige of the past, the Stormtrack forum, Storm chaser Brett Roberts astutely observed that the 2000s marked an era where the internet's heaviest users were dominated by "nerds", those of us who were the first to enthusiastically embrace the technology. I can't disagree with that. The 'heyday' of the web was built by and for people like us. The smartphone ushered in an era where internet use rapidly became society-wide for the first time. That development meant that everything would start to be tailored for the average person, not just the OG "power users" of the 'net. Not only that, but it was a perfect target for exploitation by corporate interests who have now nearly completely consumed the online space, leaving the web as a shell of holdouts like me who had hoped that one day the iron grasp of social media would be loosed.

But all of the data show that those hopes are fading. The algorithms of the corporate world are just too strong, the dopamine hits of likes and shares just too consuming of a drug for the average person to consider turning aside from.

And if all that wasn't enough, artificial intelligence is poised to subsume every piece of written or recorded material ever produced by humans in what could be the knockout punch to the web. AI is quite literally "digital communism": a system that effectively abolishes intellectual property, completely ingesting it for the purpose of exploiting and replacing any and all value it holds. All of this, in the name of the "common good", will irrevocably divert any revenue from that IP from its owners to Big Tech.

I've always said I'd keep my web site going indefinitely, marching onward through whatever technological fads or revolutions came down the pike. Will this and other site's continued presences only serve to feed the Big Tech-controlled AI juggernaut, offering themselves up to any new system that hasn't already captured our life's work for the purpose of replacing it? Or will society come to its senses, releasing itself from the grip of Big Tech back to something resembling the decentralized web we enjoyed in the past? Only time will tell what we collectively decide to allow.