On 6 August 1991 in a dimly lit, air-conditioned back room of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), a little NeXT workstation affectionately named ‘Primo II’ blinked away in silence, a tattered paper sticker on the front displaying the warning, "This machine is a server: DO NOT POWER DOWN". It hosted http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html where in bold, black lettering, the site told anyone interested exactly what it was about. "The World Wide Web (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information-retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document." This was the world’s first website.

11 years previously, physicist Tim Berners-Lee had been working on a project called Enquire, a prototype system that used the concept of hypertext to allow the sharing and updating of information among CERN’s researchers. At this point the internet had become a haven for scientists and academics alike, and by 1989 CERN had become the largest internet node in Europe. Berners-Lee, by this time a fellow of the organisation, wrote a paper entitled Information Management: A Proposal, an attempt to persuade his managers that a global hypertext system akin to Enquire was in CERN’s interest. It suggested the theory that a web of notes with linkable references could be placed on top of existing computer networks to facilitate remotely accessible ‘linked information systems’. A year later it was approved, and Berners-Lee went about coding the first web browser/editor – aptly named ‘World Wide Web’ – and the first server, httpd (HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon), both of which ran on NeXT systems. The problem, however, was that NeXT systems were far more advanced than general computing equipment available at the time, thus a much less sophisticated version of the browser software was required. Come Spring the following year, Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau were already testing a universal line mode browser able to run on any machine simply by typing commands, allowing anyone with an internet connection to access the web’s information resources. Three days after powering up Primo II with a copy of the server application, he posted an article to the newsgroup alt.hypertext with a short summary of the web and how internet users could take part. “The WWW world consists of documents and links. Indexes are special documents that, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another ‘virtual’ document containing links to the documents found. To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse).” The link was born.

The web has evolved considerably since that momentous day nearly 17 years ago. The link marked the beginning of the internet as we know it (for many, the web and the internet have become synonymous), the first way in which we could interact with information through this new protocol. Just three years after Berners-Lee made his announcement, the web hit an annual growth rate of 341,634 per cent, spurring on an ever-increasing amount of home users to connect. The WWW usage figures quickly surpassed any other protocol, and with the amount of hosts doubling every year, it was clear that the web was here to stay. By the turn of the century, 304 million people had internet access. Today, that figure is estimated to be closer to 1.3 billion.

Just what was it about the link that attracted so many people? In 1992, Michael Hauben wrote in his article The Net and Netizens: The Impact the Net Has on People’s Lives, "We are seeing a revitalisation of society. The frameworks are being redesigned from the bottom up. A new, more democratic world is becoming possible." 16 years on from the introduction of the web and we’re able to have faceto- face conversations with people on the other side of the world, watch TV shows online, download music, vote for our favourite politician, play games, buy the latest trainers and all whenever we want; but the essence of the link hasn’t changed. We still connect to the internet to do one thing: retrieve information. The way in which we interact with that information has, however, dramatically evolved.

The web has seen its commerce phase too. As soon as the commercial sector realised there was money to be made, major companies starting jumping on board, pushing their goods and services in what was to become a fiercely competitive marketplace. The dotcom boom, an era defined by soaring stock market values in the new internet sector with a surrounding aura of new economy, hit in the mid- Nineties, climaxed in 1999 and eventually burst over the following two years, wiping out $5 trillion in US dollars in market value and marking the beginning of a mild but lengthy recession in the developed world. Only a handful of the larger dotcom businesses survived, eBay and Amazon among them – both based on traditional business models.

Although still in its infancy, the web is beginning to mature. Tangible goods don’t seem so cheap any more; intangible goods (downloaded music increasingly considered the latter) are almost expected to be free and available on demand. People have become used to the internet as another instrument of lifestyle, taken for granted by the next generation born into a world where it knows no different. However, the explosion in popularity of blogs and wikis over the last five years are taking the web back to Berners- Lee’s original vision of a decentralised information resource. User-generated content is feeding the next big growth, and simultaneously the development of technology that allows more and more creativity in our own homes. Aspiring musicians can record their latest works and unleash them onto the world hours later at little to no cost. Budding filmmakers can publish for free on YouTube in the hope of becoming the next Scorsese. Hardware has evolved to allow, for example, high-definition movie content to stream instantaneously from a completely different continent to our desktops or even our mobile phones, while software technologies like Flash facilitate the delivery of content in an immersive, engaging way. Now the novelty of simply having an online presence has worn off, retailers and service providers fight for our attention by utilising such technologies. Now it’s not only a case of who’s got the best deal but instead who’s got the best deal as well as the most captivating delivery method.

The humble link of yesteryear has evolved into something much, much more complex today. The combination of development technologies means modern websites can be much more interactive, functional and fast. With each new development the user experience is altered, but the formula hasn’t changed – the best one always comes out on top. Be it a site that effectively performs its function, such as Google or Wikipedia, or one that fills a certain niche, like Facebook or Last.FM; those that grab our attention win every time.

So what exactly is the secret behind the success of these sites? How do we end up furiously tapping our most personal details into a rather dodgy-looking form on a brand-new website belonging to a complete unknown, and not only keep going back but tell our friends about it too? We’re no longer amazed simply by the fact that we can buy ourselves a new pair of Nike Airs without leaving the living room, so retailers and service providers alike are starting to rely on consumer psychology, more commonly seen on the high street and only recently making the transition to the virtual. The difference with the internet, however, is that we’re not outside of our comfort zones – in a high-street shop, a pushy salesperson might convince us into buying something we really don’t want, whereas online we can eternally banish anything that doesn’t satisfy our personal tastes with a single click. As a result, site design is starting to incorporate techniques such as digital spotlighting and intelligent product placement to hold our attention, all contributing to a more intuitively navigable web. Designers are taking advantage of technology in order to combine the senses, challenging and engaging users in a more immersive online environment by bringing sound and interaction to their sites, quickly moving away from static, structured pages to fullscreen interfaces. This is radically altering the approach to designing a site, taking the old textbook-standard style and pushing it into the human-computer interaction arena. Today web designers they need to be multidisciplinary visionaries, business savvy, technologically proficient experts in graphic arts, animation, programming languages, systems administration and psychology. Web design is no longer a skill: it’s a science.

As websites begin to replicate physical environments instead of mimicking twodimensional print design, it’s important to understand how we as receptors perceive colour. Colour conveys meaning primarily in two ways – through natural associations and psychological symbolism. There are no rules as such; each individual will base their perception of a colour and its meaning on personal intuitive experience and within the context of culture. For example, white symbolises death in Japanese culture, whereas Westerners generally associate it with purity. The mind brings memory and imagination to the activity of sensing colour and combines them with awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement in order to decide what a colour means in a certain situation, which more often than not can be several things – we associate black with death and yet a black leather chair would be considered symbolic of affluence and sophistication. The way in which a colour makes us feel (‘shocking pink’ or ‘red hot’) is known as an indeterminate attribute because it cannot be measured, but instead relies on our own experience. A determinate attribute, on the other hand, can be in levels of hue, saturation and brightness.

Colour can also tell us how rich or complex an environment may be. The saturation of a colour has more of an affect on us than the hue itself – pale colours are much more calming than strong, exciting colours. Pastel schemes are often associated with natural and organic surroundings, whereas richly saturated schemes are representative of artificial man-made environments. Think about the high street. You’re constantly subjected to striking colours that demand your attention and are more stressful to the brain. When attempting to simulate these effects with an online environment, we need to take into account the subject of the site. Take a look at www.play.com. You’re instantly bombarded by bold colours that imply a product-rich setting, akin to a high-street store. A photography portfolio surrounded by a mix of strong colours would detract attention away from the content itself, so instead we’d use cool colours to allow the images to take focus; an organic food store would logically use an earthy scheme as opposed to an intense one. Consumer screen and graphics technologies have advanced enough to handle a gamut of up to 16.7 million distinct colours (24 bit), coming much closer to mimicking those found in nature. This allows us to simulate depth through artificial tricks of light such as shadows, highlights and reflections. Sound also now plays an integral part in modern site design to reinforce the feeling of being in a real-world environment. In reality, an action generally has an accompanying sound and we rely on aural feedback to supply confirmation. On the web, up until recently every action produced the same sound, a mouse click, which made for a pretty dull experience. The growth in use of broadband connections and the development of software technologies such as Flash, however, are enabling designers to take advantage of being able to push more data to the user. The use of audio has progressed from simple ambient background music to being heavily incorporated as engaging effects relevant to the interface.

The addition of sound and rich colour to the modern web has inadvertently satisfied another sense: touch. Because elements of design are beginning to look, sound and now act like their real-world counterparts through animation, it’s easy for the mind to be fooled into believing it’s interacting with a three-dimensional interface as opposed to a flat image. Technology is taking it one step further with touch-screen displays, removing the last barrier between user and interface by allowing us to interact directly with content. Apple’s recently launched Multi-Touch displays, for example, allow hand gestures to do things like drag objects across the screen or grab the corners of an image to directly manipulate its size. Add it all together and we have something as close to tactile feedback as computers can reasonably achieve.

Last year, streaming high-definition video became a reality with Flash Player 9, blurring the line between a computer and a television; rich internet applications hit the world with the release of Adobe AIR, promising to blend the desktop with the web. Immersive design is rapidly becoming the way forward as flat pages give way to full-blown interfaces, compiling and displaying information from a whole number of sources. Understanding the way in which users will interact with such a mashup of data and technology will be crucial to the success of a web designer. It’s not hard to imagine a web where we can pick up virtual representations of products and spin them round in 3D with our hands, and even literally ‘place’ them into a shopping cart. The technology already exists, but isn’t practical or affordable enough yet to see it deployed en masse. The moment when computers imitate and respond to our thoughts seamlessly will be the moment when the internet will become completely ubiquitous.