Hard to believe that it’s been 4 years since I started doing this web thing out own my own. Believe it or not though, 4 years have come and gone and I’m still at it. Deep down I can’t imagine doing anything else.

It’s an amazing phenomenon that the two disciplines I most loved as a teen, art and computers, could converge in such a way that I could make a livelihood from it. Call it providence I suppose.

I’ve been doing websites since 1996, so it’s been an interesting ride from my early webpage work in one of the first WYSIWYG editors, Adobe Pagemill 1.0. That was even back before using <table>‘s for layout was widely adopted. I watched Microsoft undercut Netscape with the release of Internet Explorer 4. The tide of web development was definitely starting to change.

As long as I’ve been at this, I guess you start to see truth in the adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. The browser wars still rage, and we (web designers and developers) are caught in the middle. It’s a really sad state of affairs when you become proud of the workarounds you have to devise for un-compliant web browsers just for the sake of maintaining the experience cross-platform. As I’ve said before, such is our existence.

At least the future of web development is looking brighter. Not only are browsers more, and more standards-based, while maintaining backwards compatibility, but we’re seeing the rise of development frameworks and behavioral APIs. There couldn’t be a better time to be in the web industry really. As dust has settled on the first web bubble – and some even say it’s settling on the second bubble – we have the benefit seeing who’s survived and how they’ve done it. I wish I could say we’re past all the gimmicky and cliché riddled websites, but alas, I doubt we’ll ever move beyond that unless management and marketers leave web development to the web developers.

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