Web design restrictions

At that time there were many technological restrictions which influenced the Web design, such as:

• slow connections (the connection was realized through the modems, electronic devices that connect computers to the Internet)
• monochrome monitors (one-color display monitors)
• the data transfer rate provided by the ISP's was very low, resulting in slow connections

These restrictions influenced the Web sites' design, resulting in the usage of a certain layout that was:

• linear, everything went from the top to the bottom
• left to right sequences of text and images
• interspersed layout, with numerous carriage returns and other separators such as bullets and horizontal lines
• these sites usually had banners as the headline, edge to edge text that ran for the full page with blank lines for segmentations.

All that was possible in terms of interaction was single-clicking on text or images to move to a new page (or another part of the same page). This lack of interaction severely limited what was possible to implement on the Web, making the Web behavior extremely simple. In this sense, even if the early designed Web sites were easy to use, the poor structure and layout could still easily ruin the user experience. However, with the additions of features like scripts, frames, forms, actions, and applets, the apparent ease of use vanished. Designers now have to find balances between the ease of use and the state of technological development of the Web site.

For the many print-oriented graphic designers who entered the Web site design world in the 1990s, the Web was new and different. It was technologically constrained but more accessible, and it introduced new concepts, like the hyper linking of documents. However, little of this was news to software designers, GUI (graphical user interface) programmers, and ergonomics experts, who had been concerned with nearly identical problems in the design of software interfaces for many years. One area that was new was the importance of content over form and behavior, and thus the discipline of information architecture quickly grew to solve that problem. However, as the cutting edge of Web design has shifted from presentation to transaction, behavior is once again the dominant concern, although content must remain quite important as well. The process of Web site design is not really different from the design of software applications, although the requirements of content and certain technical limitations affect the direction that the design solution ultimately takes.