Lexington, KY Web Design Experience
I have been a Lexington, KY web design and development company owner since 1999. During that time, things have changed dramatically in the entire industry and in my home town. Here are some basic insights into how different web design and development is today from what I experienced about twenty-four years ago.
640×480 vs. 1,920×1,080
According to statcounter (as of October, 2022), the most common desktop resolution is 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels high. That’s a far cry from 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high by screens in the mid-late 1990’s, when the web first became available to the public. I recently opened a Photoshop file of a web interface I created in 1999, which I discovered was 580×400. It seemed microscopic compared to today’s dimensions.
This post isn’t about hardware, but I do recall the CRT monitors like the Sony Trinitron with its fantastic dot pitch and those two annoying horizontal lines. But I digress.
Tables vs. Divs
Many developers who have been involved in web production for the past ten years won’t remember this, but we used to develop entire sites using tables. That’s right—there were no divs. In the late 1990’s we were not only producing extremely small interfaces, but we were doing it entirely in tables.
Imagine a table <table> filled with rows <tr>and rows filled with cells <td> and cells filled with content. The content was made almost exclusively of text and small, low pixel-count images, as video was far too large. Animated GIFs and hover states were about the only moving elements on a screen, but it was still an exciting time.
Static vs. Responsive
There were no tablets or smart phones in the late 1990’s, and there were only a couple of sizes of screen resolutions, for all practical purposes. So there was no need to create responsive interfaces. In fact, they didn’t exist, so that wasn’t an option. The result was the creation of websites in static widths. Sites would still scroll, of course, but the widths were locked in place. Only later, when responsive code became available and was supported by browsers, would variable widths and content sizes become available to developers.
Lexington, KY Web Design at a Glance
NetMediaOne was our original name, though we changed it to Able Engine and to Streamline later on. The name NetMedia was already taken, so we added “One” like numerous other companies did at the time. It was never a great name, which is why we rebranded. But that’s not the point of this post.
We weren’t in huge markets, so we didn’t have access to enormous clients. But we still performed at a high level for such organizations as University of Kentucky, Indiana University, Riley Hospital for Children, BigTrends, and others.
There were a few other companies—competitors, to be fair—which formed around that same time. To my knowledge, none of them exists today, so I assume our company is the oldest web design firm in Lexington and the surrounding region. One company that I held in the highest regard was called Elevation Creative and was (co?)founded by a designer named Jeff Ruth. That company produced some amazing work, but it’s unfortunately no longer around.
In any event, when it comes to Lexington, KY web design companies, we’ve been here virtually from the beginning. We’ve seen other companies come and go. We’ve seen technologies come and go. That’s the nature of this business, but we’ve managed to produce good work for good clients. That seems to be a reasonable recipe for success almost anywhere.
Conclusion
If you have any questions or are in need of web design and development, mobile app design and development, or similar services, please contact us any time. We’re always happy to discuss your project.
