Infographic: The Evolution of Web Design

26 Years. Over a quarter century. That’s how long it’s been since the publication of the first website in 1991, info.cern.ch. That’s right. That right there is a link to the very first website ever published.

Since then we’ve created banner ads, pop-ups, CAPTCHAs, social media, and countless layers of the front end tech stack we enjoy today with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

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Let’s also ponder what trends web design will follow during the next quarter century. We are definitely getting a VR enabled web. Check out the VRVCA, a consortium of venture capital funds, including HTC and NVIDIA, who together are investing over $18B in VR. The specification for WebVR is underway and will be submitted to the W3C. WebVR is already available in pre-release builds of Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla hosts the API documentation.

Check out this WebVR demo video on YouTube to get a sense of what’s coming. It was built with A-Frame, a framework for creating VR experiences. Here’s a live demo of a 3D environment, and here’s one that’s a 360-degree moving video!

I imagine in far less than another 25 years, maybe within 5 years, we’ll be able to walk into our own virtual room (instead of opening our home page), where we can decorate our private space with our own furniture, wallpaper, architecture, and customized view of the world.

Instead of visiting Spotify or Soundcloud to start playing our music, we’ll just access our playlist through a virtual stereo, and as the music is playing, a beautiful 3D structure that surrounds us can vibrate hypnotically as we lounge back and enjoy.

And of course, the current world wide web will remain available, of course, for those who don’t want to wear a VR helmet or simply want to access their data quickly on a standard computer screen.

This infographic was originally published on Kissmetrics.com