Web design styles have been evolving rapidly in recent years, and the design industry has sprouted up like an over watered Chia Pet, incubated in an industrial green house, and crammed full of Miracle Grow laced with crystal meth. I clearly remember the time (circa 1990′s) when the only sites available to help you put up your website were along the lines of cgi-resources.com and htmlgoodies.com. You got a basic script that did mostly what you wanted, hacked away at it, and tried to figure out how to make some sort of basic layout nesting and re-nesting tables until finally a family of birds moved in.

Themes? Templates? Skins? There were a few “free template” sites around back then, but they were fairly obscure, and commercial templates were virtually non-existent. A script came with one look – plain, and if you wanted to change it, you spent a few weeks in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop pasting together graphics and inserting rotating gifs. If you have no idea what I’m talking about then you haven’t been webmastering until sometime in the 2000′s when starting up a site had become easier and prettier.

Since commercial template design entered the scene in the 2000′s, the styles on the market have been constantly changing, especially over the last few years. Below, we’ve compiled a comparative sampling from 2001 through 2010 showcasing the evolution of designs. You’ll be shocked at where we started with our layouts and just how far we’ve come.
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