As in any other invention, the web designing also had to undergo many changes before it attained the latest techniques. It was a step by step progress.

In the beginning, websites were written in basic HTML, a markup language, giving websites basic structure like headings and paragraphs and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different to existing forms of communication - users could easily open other pages using browsers.

HTML started off fairly unobtrusively at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) during the early 90s and was intended to provide a way to link related research papers and to create a "web" of information. It soon grew beyond that, though, as various people found that HTML was incredibly versatile, but the standard at the time, HTML 0.9 was severely limited in what it could do. Browsers at the time simply displayed headers, paragraphs, links and some presentational markup like bold and italic. When the Mosaic graphical WWW browser was written by the NCSA (National Centre for Supercomputing Applications) it allowed for coders to include images on the same page as the HTML document rather than just linking to them like any other document, and when a group of programmers from the Mosaic team created their own program called Netscape Navigator, HTML and the web really took off .

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, published a website in August 1991, making him also the first web designer. His first was to use hypertext with an existing email link. Tim Berners-Lee originally intended HTML to remain purely "semantic", like the SGML language he had based it on, and for all presentation and layout to be handled by style-sheets, but the style-sheet specification was a long way off. 

As the Web and web design progressed, the markup language used to make it, known as Hypertext Mark-up Language or html, became more complex and flexible.Features like tables, which could be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices.With  Netscape's introduction of the TABLE tag for grids of data (like Excel Spreadsheets), designers had found a sneaky way to (fairly) precisely place parts of the document anywhere they pleased. . With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like CSS further changed and enhanced the way the Web is made.

The introduction of Abode Flash into an already interactivity-ready scene has further changed the face of the Web. Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both the Abode Flash Player, and to the Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program. Adobe Flash Professional is used to create content for the Abode Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices). The Flash Player features support for vactor and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActiomScript and bi-directional streaming of audio and video. There are also versions of the Flash Player for mobile phones and other non-PC devices.

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation, interactivity to web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.