Website Design NZ
 | Website Design NZ
New Zealand was connected to the Internet for the first time in 1989, the result of years of negotiation with the American government and NASA. Our connection was the first in the whole of the Asia-Pacific region. That's correct, we were online before Australia. One of the first Kiwi websites arrived two years later. govt.co.nz was developed by the Ministry of Commerce as online source of information about New Zealand's government. NZ's government was the second, after the U.S. to establish a presence online. This became New Zealand's first website in 1993. The man behind the project was Nathan Torkington, one of the first graphic designers NZ produced. Very early websites were limited by slow Internet speed, and pages were normally almost completely full of text. Mosaic, the leading commercially available web browser of the early 90's, allowed internet users to turn off pictures and images. This meant that a page could load in a couple of minutes instead of ten. Up until 1996 most NZ websites looked like basic versions of a modern blog. They were used for two main purposes; firstly as discussion boards for Kiwi's to communicate locally and internationally. Secondly, early websites were used as specialized news services. Obscure was, and still is, a popular news service providing insider information on the dance music scene in Wellington. In the mid 90's information content and new possibilities for communication with the whole world were far more important than the design of a website. From the mid 90's websites were becoming image-driven. Companies began to spend vast sums of money developing websites that capitalized on the latest advances in technology to create ever more impressive visual displays of animation and special effects. These techniques were employed to help businesses who were vying to stand out from online the crowd and provide a point of differentiation over their competitors. This trend continued to expand rapidly throughout the last decade but in recent years commercial web design strategies have come almost full circle. Leading sites such as eBay, Google and Twitter have pioneered a resurgence of clean pages, plain text and a sparing use of color. Most of the complex, animated websites that were so popular in recent years have been built using a web development tool named Flash. Website Design NZ |
