1996: The Year in Review

Design

Perhaps one of the most obvious and visible changes over the past year is in the quality of visual design on the Internet. At the beginning of 1996 it was still acceptable for most professional sites to have OK-but-not-terribly-innovative design since it was enough of an effort to get the site up in he first place. However, now that so many consumer and professional sites already exist, and now that more and more professional designers and agencies are familiar with the Web, the quality of design had risen rapidly.

It is no longer enough for most companies to simply have a "look" to their site, but most are now realizing the imperative that that "look" be professional and consistent with their identity and brand in other corporate design, such as print and television advertising and collateral. While most sites initially launched huge, bandwidth-heavy homages to themselves, once they had to use the sites themselves--from home on a 14.4 connection instead of in their offices on a T1--they have tended to design "down" for faster performance but with an eye to an expectation of higher sophistication in design.

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