What goes around comes around
April 2010
It has to be said that I’m no philosopher. It takes me several pints of lager and a few whiskies before I can ramble incoherently enough to get away with sounding like I know what I’m talking about with subjects like the meaning of life, the answer to it all and the all time unanswerable question of why all people who live in council houses all have 50 inch plasma televisions and Sky Plus boxes.Nevertheless, the subject of life and its twists and turns is always a fascinating one. When people set out on a path, they usually get distracted somewhere along the way and end up taking a different route. Some people end up doing something completely different to what they set out to do and others may end up where they intended, having got there in a completely different way. The rest end up working in McDonalds.
For example, I left school at 16 to become a professional racing driver. En route I spent a couple of years as a mechanic where I spent every single day getting my hands cut to shreds and coming home every day stinking to high heaven and covered in more oil than a Dutch porn star. As well as only being paid in dog biscuits and mud, I also knew that the job, like most involving manual labour, was being superseded by computers. Realising that was where both the future lay and where the money was, I decided to pursue a career in the IT world. This inadvertently led me to the internet industry, which opened the door to other businesses. The success of my own website also led me into the world of amateur journalism. Combined with contacts through various businesses, I ended up well established in the karting world where I am now a paid racing driver. Technically that makes me a professional.
It’s a similar story for my boss. He set out to become a rock star back in the middle ages and tore up the U.S. charts before his band split up. After this, he moved into the recording studio he’d built which led to him spending more and more time using computerised equipment. This led to forming a computer company, which in turn evolved into an Internet business. The global and far reaching nature of the internet allowed his website to be found my old fans, which re-ignited interest in his band and resulted in them reforming. So, as with my racing, his life came full circle.
This brings me speedily rock ‘n rolling neatly onto the subject of website evolution.
You see when websites first appeared they mainly consisted of text on a page and maybe a couple of images. They were just like a baby: Small, simple creatures with no hair or teeth and nappies full of poop. They had a long road ahead of them and would need careful nurturing.
As they developed, they soon started getting more advanced. Animated gifs became all the rage because people liked the idea of having logos that spun around. Flash came on the scene and suddenly everybody wanted a website built entirely using this wondrous and magical toy. Websites then started becoming very noisy as people wanted pointless sound effects whenever someone rolled over their flashy button. Javascript started allowing sites to have quirky things like tickertape newsreels and those wonderful dropdown menu bars that became so popular in 2001.
In other words, the internet industry had entered its prepubescent stage. It had not yet fully matured. It was enjoying playing with lots of different toys and was making its unique mark and finding its place in the world.
The addition of all these gadgets was all wonderful but the problem was sites started to become very cluttered. People stopped thinking about how a site looked because they were spending too much time playing around with the gadgets. In keeping with my philosophical analogy, the Internet industry was in its teens, broke out in acne, started experimenting with drugs and was having sex with anything that moved.
As with any teenager, outside influences changed the character of the being. With the rise of the Google Empire, Search Engine Optimization companies started springing up everywhere trying to make money off the back of Google. First they told website owners not to use animation on a site because it distracted the visitor. Sound effects became a taboo because they caused pages to take an eternity to load. Then they told people that Javascript was bad and Google would not index the site if they used it. They then decided that Google would not be able to see any sites that were built in Flash. Then some SEO or accessibility halfwit decided that font tags and tables were wrong and insisted that designers started building sites completely using text and formatted using stylesheets.
In other words, the school bullies resorted to peer pressure tactics. They threatened to flush people’s heads down toilets and steal their dinner money if they didn’t do what they said. These experiences were just character building to the website world.
As with any teenager, the website just wanted to fit in and be part of the cool gang. So what we have now are websites that are mainly just text on a page and a few images. In other words, websites are back to what they were in the first place. The only difference is that they have grown up and look a bit nicer.
So now the website world has very much entered its mid twenties and has matured into an attractive, well groomed, chisel-jawed and confident being. What we have to look forward to now is middle-age, the mid-life crisis, old-age and senility and finally death. Whatever shape or form that takes, I’m pretty sure the Internet will age gracefully.
So there you have it. The evolutionary cycle of life will always come full circle. Perhaps that’s why the majority of the inhabitants of this country are degenerating into apes who can only communicate using grunts and whistles. Nevertheless, one thing is absolutely certain: The Internet is a truly magnificent invention and can open doors to endless possibilities.
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