Okay, I can tell I am sick of computers. I walked into Micro Center and saw a nice rig. A quad core AMD machine, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard-drive, decent video for $200.00. My reaction?? “Meh.”

I literally had to giggle. I couldn’t believe that his inner geek couldn’t muster any excitement about this relatively new technology on store shelves at a really good price. Has his career stagnated his inner geek that much? Or has the foundation of computers not change enough to impact the IT field?

Now don’t get me wrong. That’s some serious leaps and bounds of IT technology compared to what it used to be. However, the foundation remains the same when it’s broken down to the essentials: CPU, hard-drive, RAM, video output, keyboard, mouse, an external drive (used to be floppy; now a type of disc drive). All that is new is how much of one of these items can fit into the smallest of spaces.

I know my inner geek would become very bored if I continued to pursue an exclusive IT field. Fortunately, I do not have that stagnation feeling within web design or development. In the past 10 years I have seen so much evolve in web design and web development, and I’m only going to scrape the tip of the evolution iceberg within this post of how so.

Here are few things I noticed the web community is doing to always change (including the fundamentals to some degree), while the IT field’s foundations have barely changed.

Emerging Technology
There are new frameworks frequently emerging such as AJAX. There are new and different contending platforms like the ending browser wars and increasing diversity of mobile devices. New languages/syntaxes are coming into the scene such as CSS3 & HTML5. New references for something or another. My favorite: “It’s no longer DHTML. It’s DOM Scripting.”

More Artists In The Field
Each day graphic designers, marketers, entrepreneurs…all of the creative people in the world are embracing web development and web design. This leads to more imagination and ingenious methods to make our human lives much more interesting.

Search Engines
SEO has given more purpose to the web markup semantics. It’s no longer just making the hierarchy of a web page be coherent for the user to read, but for also spiders to dissect the web and be able to piece it back together for us when we are searching for something.

Social Media
There will always be a need of some form of interfacing for us to share all of that information out there on the web (or offline) amongst ourselves.

And that’s just four of the reasons why I see web design and web development not going to plateau anytime soon. According the W3C, this is how long it will take to download the internet chocked full of web design or web development variations. It’s just going to get bigger and better starting tomorrow. Long live web design and development!