Aug 2, 2022

WHAT PLATFORM SHOULD I USE TO BUILD MY WEBSITE?

This is a question I am often asked.

As my main focus is on SMALL BUSINESS, with a real desire to enable small business operators to manage their own online space. We assist them to learn, so my answer, in most cases, "what's best for you to manage, and does what you need and can afford". Having said that, a great online presence these days is critical for EVERY small business.

So let's see why and how fast it has, and still is moving!

Christmas Day 2020 announced 30 years of the World Wide Web!

YES, 30 YEARS!! AND I do remember those early days.

25th December 1990

Berners-Lee wrote what would become known as WorldWideWeb (the first web browser, not to be confused with the World Wide Web) on a NeXT Computer in just 2 months, while working for CERN. Successive builds circulated around CERB among Berners-Lee's colleagues and were released to the public, though Internet newsgroups, in August 1991.

FACT: "WorldWideWeb was the first web browser and editor. The source code was released into the public domain on April 30, 1993".

World Firsts

The first web page went live! Dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project, the first web page, by Tim Berners-Lee, ran on a NeXT computer at the European organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN.

The first web page address,

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (image), outlined how to create Web pages, pretty much about hypertext. No screenshots were taken of the site before 1992. Want to know how it all worked and snowballed from there? Check out What The Heck Is The Internet .

The 1st Of Many Website Builders

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes the first web page

1994 – Beverly Hills Internet (BHI), (renamed GeoCities).

Acquired by Yahoo on 28th Jan 1999.

The 38 million-page site was shut down in 2009

1995 – Microsoft FrontPage (My very first design platform in 1996)

1997 – Dreamweaver

2003 – WordPress.org and Squarespace

2005 – WordPress.com

2006 – Wix, Weebly, Shopify

2007 – Jimdo

2009 – BigCommerce

2013 – Webflow

2014 – HTML5

2016 – Wix ADI

2018 – Jimdo Dolphin

The Ecommerce Party

About 10 years ago, the e-commerce website builders really stated to come into their own, so much so that it now deserves its own section.

Online sales are now topping the trillion-dollar space, and you can bet that our website builders are in it for the long haul. Shopify, BigCommerce, and Sellfy are just a handful of the e-commerce platforms that exploded in popularity over the last five years.

2019 - 2020

The real guts of builders to date have been templates with drag and drop interfaces, we've come a long way from the veritable rabbit warren of the ‘90s. The fifth generation of HTML, HTML5, has given us an amazing array of new possibilities, without the old code clunkers of the 1990's and early 2000's.

As website builders and design tools have grown in sophistication, many have become very specific, catering to niche industry markets. From portfolio website builders to others specific to blog writers, photographers, and e-commerce, and that's just the tip of the ice-burg.

As design has flourished, so too has the demand for designer-oriented tools. Webflow for example, along with Wix and Squarespace, is a far more technical builder than most of its peers, released in 2013. These platforms now boasts an array of stunning Free and Paid templates that even the newest users will love. Content has amazing customisation and some great starters for E-Commerce, Portfolios, Restaurants and small business packages.