The Web Turns Thirty

A proposal from March 1989

Thirty years ago today, a British computer scientist at CERN, the physics laboratory near Geneva, handed his manager a proposal for linking documents across the laboratory's computers.

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal became the web. The first website was running by the end of 1990, and in 1993 CERN made the web's software free for anyone to use.

Most of what followed is familiar: a gold rush, a crash, phones, social networks, and a long parade of things that came and went.

For a business deciding where to spend effort this year, what survived thirty years is more useful than what is new.

What lasted

• Plain pages of text and pictures, readable in any browser.
• Links from one page to another, which were the whole idea.
• Addresses that stayed put, so links and bookmarks kept working.
• Domain names, held by whoever registers and renews them.
• Common image formats such as JPEG, readable for decades.
• Email, older than the web and still how businesses reach customers.

The third is the one businesses throw away themselves. A rebuild that changes every page address breaks every link anyone ever made to the site, and nothing on the new site shows the loss.

The first site still opens

The clearest evidence is the first website itself.

In 2013 CERN restored it at its original address. It is plain text and links, written on a computer long since retired, and it opens on a phone today without complaint.

Nobody had to convert it or pay a platform to keep it. Plain pages at an address somebody looks after simply keep working.

That durability is available to every business site, and many give it up without noticing.

What vanished

The list of what did not last is longer, and it has a pattern.

Flash intros and splash pages that made visitors wait or click Skip. Java applets, hit counters and guestbooks. Music that played as a page opened.

Free home-page services that closed and took their sites with them. Directories that sold listings and then stopped existing. Platforms businesses were told they had to be on.

Flash is the starkest case. The iPhone never ran it, browsers increasingly refuse it without permission, and Adobe stops supporting it at the end of next year.

The pattern behind both lists

Everything on the first list rests on open standards no single company owns. Anyone can build a browser that reads a page, and every browser does.

Most of the second list depended on one company's plugin, service or plans. When the company moved on, the thing went with it. The rest simply annoyed people.

Google+ is the current example. Consumer Google+ closes on April 2, taking with it the posts, photographs and followers businesses built there.

None of those were foolish choices at the time. They were rented.

Rented and owned

The useful distinction for a business is not old against new. It is rented against owned.

A Facebook page, an Instagram account, a directory listing: each reaches people your website never will, and each is worth having. But the rules, the reach and the future of each belong to someone else.

Your domain, your website and the email list you built with permission are yours. They change when you change them.

Use the rented places to reach people, and the owned ones to keep what you have built.

A worked example

A piano restoration business registered its domain in 1998. The first site was five plain pages: the work, the workshop, the process, prices and a phone number.

In 2004 a designer added a Flash introduction with music. It never worked on phones and was quietly removed years later.

A page on a free hosting community vanished when the service closed. A Google+ page, opened in 2012, has a few weeks left.

The page explaining the restoration process kept the same address through three redesigns. Piano teachers, a tuners' forum and a music school have linked to it for years.

People still find the business through links written a decade ago. Everything clever around that page has gone; the page is still there.

Addresses are the asset

A page's address is worth more than most owners realise, because every link, bookmark and search result points at it.

When a site is rebuilt, keep the addresses of pages that matter. Where one must change, redirect the old address permanently to its new page, rather than sending everything to the home page.

The same goes for the domain. Register it in the business's name, renew it several years at a time, and never let a supplier hold it in theirs.

The web's inventor made the point in a short note in 1998 titled Cool URIs Don't Change. A URI is a web address, and the advice still holds.

Where effort adds up

Effort spent on your own site accumulates. A useful page written this year can still be found, linked and read in ten years, at the same address.

Effort spent on a platform tends to expire. A post fades from the feed within days, and the account lasts only as long as the platform's interest.

That does not mean posting less. It means putting the substance at home, such as the answer to a common question as a page on the site, with the post pointing to it.

The counter-case

The long view can be overdone.

Platforms matter. Customers spend their time on Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps, and a business absent from them misses people its site will never reach.

Not every new thing is a fad, either. Search engines, online maps and phones all looked like novelties once, and became the web most people use.

And plain does not mean dated. A site built on simple, standard pages can look entirely current; the durability is underneath.

Be wherever your customers are, but keep the original of everything that matters on a domain and a site you own.

This spring

1. Confirm the domain is in the business's name.
2. Renew it for several years at once.
3. List content that exists only on platforms.
4. Copy what matters onto your own site.
5. Remove leftover plugins, intros and dead icons.
6. Keep page addresses through the next rebuild.
7. Redirect any address that has to change.

Step six is the one that protects everything else. Links, bookmarks and search results all point at addresses, and a rebuild that changes them quietly undoes years of work.

Clearing the Google+ buttons and icons off your site before the closure is covered in Google+ closes in April.

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West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.