Web Crawler/Spider for NodeJS + server-side jQuery

Most powerful, popular and production crawling/scraping package for Node, happy hacking :)

Features:

• server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM
• Configurable pool size and retries
• Control rate limit
• Priority queue of requests
• forceUTF8 mode to let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion
• Compatible with 4.x or newer version

Here is the CHANGELOG

Thanks to Authuir, we have a Chinese docs. Other languages are welcomed!

Get started

Install

$ npm install crawler

Basic usage

var Crawler = require("crawler");

var c = new Crawler({
    maxConnections : 10,
    // This will be called for each crawled page
    callback : function (error, res, done) {
        if(error){
            console.log(error);
        }else{
            var $ = res.$;
            // $ is Cheerio by default
            //a lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server
            console.log($("title").text());
        }
        done();
    }
});

// Queue just one URL, with default callback
c.queue('http://www.amazon.com');

// Queue a list of URLs
c.queue(['http://www.google.com/','http://www.yahoo.com']);

// Queue URLs with custom callbacks & parameters
c.queue([{
    uri: 'http://parishackers.org/',
    jQuery: false,

    // The global callback won't be called
    callback: function (error, res, done) {
        if(error){
            console.log(error);
        }else{
            console.log('Grabbed', res.body.length, 'bytes');
        }
        done();
    }
}]);

// Queue some HTML code directly without grabbing (mostly for tests)
c.queue([{
    html: '<p>This is a <strong>test</strong></p>'
}]);

Slow down

Use rateLimit to slow down when you are visiting web sites.

var Crawler = require("crawler");

var c = new Crawler({
    rateLimit: 1000, // `maxConnections` will be forced to 1
    callback: function(err, res, done){
        console.log(res.$("title").text());
        done();
    }
});

c.queue(tasks);//between two tasks, minimum time gap is 1000 (ms)

Custom parameters

Sometimes you have to access variables from previous request/response session, what should you do is passing parameters as same as options:

c.queue({
    uri:"http://www.google.com",
    parameter1:"value1",
    parameter2:"value2",
    parameter3:"value3"
})

then access them in callback via res.options

console.log(res.options.parameter1);

Crawler picks options only needed by request, so don’t worry about the redundance.

Raw body

If you are downloading files like image, pdf, word etc, you have to save the raw response body which means Crawler shouldn’t convert it to string. To make it happen, you need to set encoding to null

var Crawler = require("crawler");
var fs = require('fs');

var c = new Crawler({
    encoding:null,
    jQuery:false,// set false to suppress warning message.
    callback:function(err, res, done){
        if(err){
            console.error(err.stack);
        }else{
            fs.createWriteStream(res.options.filename).write(res.body);
        }

        done();
    }
});

c.queue({
    uri:"https://nodejs.org/static/images/logos/nodejs-1920x1200.png",
    filename:"nodejs-1920x1200.png"
});

preRequest

If you want to do something either synchronously or asynchronously before each request, you can try the code below. Note that direct requests won’t trigger preRequest.

var c = new Crawler({
    preRequest: function(options, done) {
        // 'options' here is not the 'options' you pass to 'c.queue', instead, it's the options that is going to be passed to 'request' module 
        console.log(options);
	// when done is called, the request will start
	done();
    },
    callback: function(err, res, done) {
        if(err) {
	    console.log(err)
	} else {
	    console.log(res.statusCode)
	}
    }
});

c.queue({
    uri: 'http://www.google.com',
    // this will override the 'preRequest' defined in crawler
    preRequest: function(options, done) {
        setTimeout(function() {
	    console.log(options);
	    done();
	}, 1000)
    }
});

Advanced

Send request directly

In case you want to send a request directly without going through the scheduler in Crawler, try the code below. direct takes the same options as queue, please refer to options for detail. The difference is when calling direct, callback must be defined explicitly, with two arguments error and response, which are the same as that of callback of method queue.

crawler.direct({
    uri: 'http://www.google.com',
    skipEventRequest: false, // default to true, direct requests won't trigger Event:'request'
    callback: function(error, response) {
        if(error) {
            console.log(error)
        } else {
            console.log(response.statusCode);
        }
    }
});

Work with bottleneck

Control rate limit for with limiter. All tasks submit to a limiter will abide the rateLimit and maxConnections restrictions of the limiter. rateLimit is the minimum time gap between two tasks. maxConnections is the maximum number of tasks that can be running at the same time. Limiters are independent of each other. One common use case is setting different limiters for different proxies. One thing is worth noticing, when rateLimit is set to a non-zero value, maxConnections will be forced to 1.

var crawler = require('crawler');

var c = new Crawler({
    rateLimit: 2000,
    maxConnections: 1,
    callback: function(error, res, done) {
        if(error) {
            console.log(error)
        } else {
            var $ = res.$;
            console.log($('title').text())
        }
        done();
    }
})

// if you want to crawl some website with 2000ms gap between requests
c.queue('http://www.somewebsite.com/page/1')
c.queue('http://www.somewebsite.com/page/2')
c.queue('http://www.somewebsite.com/page/3')

// if you want to crawl some website using proxy with 2000ms gap between requests for each proxy
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/1',
    limiter:'proxy_1',
    proxy:'proxy_1'
})
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/2',
    limiter:'proxy_2',
    proxy:'proxy_2'
})
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/3',
    limiter:'proxy_3',
    proxy:'proxy_3'
})
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/4',
    limiter:'proxy_1',
    proxy:'proxy_1'
})

Normally, all limiter instances in limiter cluster in crawler are instantiated with options specified in crawler constructor. You can change property of any limiter by calling the code below. Currently, we only support changing property ‘rateLimit’ of limiter. Note that the default limiter can be accessed by c.setLimiterProperty('default', 'rateLimit', 3000). We strongly recommend that you leave limiters unchanged after their instantiation unless you know clearly what you are doing.

var c = new Crawler({});
c.setLimiterProperty('limiterName', 'propertyName', value)

Class:Crawler

Event: ‘schedule’

• options Options

Emitted when a task is being added to scheduler.

crawler.on('schedule',function(options){
    options.proxy = "http://proxy:port";
});

Event: ‘limiterChange’

• options Options
• limiter String

Emitted when limiter has been changed.

Event: ‘request’

• options Options

Emitted when crawler is ready to send a request.

If you are going to modify options at last stage before requesting, just listen on it.

crawler.on('request',function(options){
    options.qs.timestamp = new Date().getTime();
});

Event: ‘drain’

Emitted when queue is empty.

crawler.on('drain',function(){
    // For example, release a connection to database.
    db.end();// close connection to MySQL
});

crawler.queue(uri|options)

• uri String
• options Options

Enqueue a task and wait for it to be executed.

crawler.queueSize

• Number

Size of queue, read-only

Options reference

You can pass these options to the Crawler() constructor if you want them to be global or as items in the queue() calls if you want them to be specific to that item (overwriting global options)

This options list is a strict superset of mikeal’s request options and will be directly passed to the request() method.

Basic request options

• options.uri: String The url you want to crawl.
• options.timeout : Number In milliseconds (Default 15000).
• All mikeal’s request options are accepted.

Callbacks

• callback(error, res, done): Function that will be called after a request was completed
  • error: Error
  • res: http.IncomingMessage A response of standard IncomingMessage includes $ and options
    • res.statusCode: Number HTTP status code. E.G.200
    • res.body: Buffer | String HTTP response content which could be a html page, plain text or xml document e.g.
    • res.headers: Object HTTP response headers
    • res.request: Request An instance of Mikeal’s Request instead of http.ClientRequest
      • res.request.uri: urlObject HTTP request entity of parsed url
      • res.request.method: String HTTP request method. E.G. GET
      • res.request.headers: Object HTTP request headers
    • res.options: Options of this task
    • $: jQuery Selector A selector for html or xml document.
  • done: Function It must be called when you’ve done your work in callback.

Schedule options

• options.maxConnections: Number Size of the worker pool (Default 10).
• options.rateLimit: Number Number of milliseconds to delay between each requests (Default 0).
• options.priorityRange: Number Range of acceptable priorities starting from 0 (Default 10).
• options.priority: Number Priority of this request (Default 5). Low values have higher priority.

Retry options

• options.retries: Number Number of retries if the request fails (Default 3),
• options.retryTimeout: Number Number of milliseconds to wait before retrying (Default 10000),

Server-side DOM options

• options.jQuery: Boolean|String|Object Use cheerio with default configurations to inject document if true or “cheerio”. Or use customized cheerio if an object with Parser options. Disable injecting jQuery selector if false. If you have memory leak issue in your project, use “whacko”, an alternative parser,to avoid that. (Default true)

Charset encoding

• options.forceUTF8: Boolean If true crawler will get charset from HTTP headers or meta tag in html and convert it to UTF8 if necessary. Never worry about encoding anymore! (Default true),
• options.incomingEncoding: String With forceUTF8: true to set encoding manually (Default null) so that crawler will not have to detect charset by itself. For example, incomingEncoding : 'windows-1255'. See all supported encodings

Cache

• options.skipDuplicates: Boolean If true skips URIs that were already crawled, without even calling callback() (Default false). This is not recommended, it’s better to handle outside Crawler use seenreq

Http headers

• options.rotateUA: Boolean If true, userAgent should be an array and rotate it (Default false)
• options.userAgent: String|Array, If rotateUA is false, but userAgent is an array, crawler will use the first one.
• options.referer: String If truthy sets the HTTP referer header
• options.removeRefererHeader: Boolean If true preserves the set referer during redirects
• options.headers: Object Raw key-value of http headers

Https socks5

const Agent = require('socks5-https-client/lib/Agent');
//...
var c = new Crawler({
    // rateLimit: 2000,
    maxConnections: 20,
    agentClass: Agent, //adding socks5 https agent
    method: 'GET',
    strictSSL: true,
    agentOptions: {
        socksHost: 'localhost',
        socksPort: 9050
    },
    // debug: true,
    callback: function (error, res, done) {
        if (error) {
            console.log(error);
        } else {
            //
        }
        done();
    }
}); 

Work with Cheerio or JSDOM

Crawler by default use Cheerio instead of JSDOM. JSDOM is more robust, if you want to use JSDOM you will have to require it require('jsdom') in your own script before passing it to crawler.

Working with Cheerio

jQuery: true //(default)
//OR
jQuery: 'cheerio'
//OR
jQuery: {
    name: 'cheerio',
    options: {
        normalizeWhitespace: true,
        xmlMode: true
    }
}

These parsing options are taken directly from htmlparser2, therefore any options that can be used in htmlparser2 are valid in cheerio as well. The default options are:

{
    normalizeWhitespace: false,
    xmlMode: false,
    decodeEntities: true
}

For a full list of options and their effects, see this and htmlparser2’s options. source

Work with JSDOM

In order to work with JSDOM you will have to install it in your project folder npm install jsdom, and pass it to crawler.

var jsdom = require('jsdom');
var Crawler = require('crawler');

var c = new Crawler({
    jQuery: jsdom
});

How to test

Crawler uses nock to mock http request, thus testing no longer relying on http server.

$ npm install
$ npm test
$ npm run cover # code coverage

Alternative: Docker

After installing Docker, you can run:

# Builds the local test environment
$ docker build -t node-crawler .

# Runs tests
$ docker run node-crawler sh -c "npm install && npm test"

# You can also ssh into the container for easier debugging
$ docker run -i -t node-crawler bash

Rough todolist

• Introducing zombie to deal with page with complex ajax
• Refactoring the code to be more maintainable
• Make Sizzle tests pass (JSDOM bug? https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom/issues#issue/81)
• Promise support
• Commander support
• Middleware support

Download Details:

Author: bda-research

GitHub: https://github.com/bda-research/node-crawler

#nodejs #node #javascript #jquery

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Web Crawler/Spider for NodeJS + server-side jQuery

Most powerful, popular and production crawling/scraping package for Node, happy hacking :)

Features:

• server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM
• Configurable pool size and retries
• Control rate limit
• Priority queue of requests
• forceUTF8 mode to let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion
• Compatible with 4.x or newer version

Here is the CHANGELOG

Thanks to Authuir, we have a Chinese docs. Other languages are welcomed!

Get started

Install

$ npm install crawler

Basic usage

var Crawler = require("crawler");

var c = new Crawler({
    maxConnections : 10,
    // This will be called for each crawled page
    callback : function (error, res, done) {
        if(error){
            console.log(error);
        }else{
            var $ = res.$;
            // $ is Cheerio by default
            //a lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server
            console.log($("title").text());
        }
        done();
    }
});

// Queue just one URL, with default callback
c.queue('http://www.amazon.com');

// Queue a list of URLs
c.queue(['http://www.google.com/','http://www.yahoo.com']);

// Queue URLs with custom callbacks & parameters
c.queue([{
    uri: 'http://parishackers.org/',
    jQuery: false,

    // The global callback won't be called
    callback: function (error, res, done) {
        if(error){
            console.log(error);
        }else{
            console.log('Grabbed', res.body.length, 'bytes');
        }
        done();
    }
}]);

// Queue some HTML code directly without grabbing (mostly for tests)
c.queue([{
    html: '<p>This is a <strong>test</strong></p>'
}]);

Slow down

Use rateLimit to slow down when you are visiting web sites.

var Crawler = require("crawler");

var c = new Crawler({
    rateLimit: 1000, // `maxConnections` will be forced to 1
    callback: function(err, res, done){
        console.log(res.$("title").text());
        done();
    }
});

c.queue(tasks);//between two tasks, minimum time gap is 1000 (ms)

Custom parameters

Sometimes you have to access variables from previous request/response session, what should you do is passing parameters as same as options:

c.queue({
    uri:"http://www.google.com",
    parameter1:"value1",
    parameter2:"value2",
    parameter3:"value3"
})

then access them in callback via res.options

console.log(res.options.parameter1);

Crawler picks options only needed by request, so don’t worry about the redundance.

Raw body

If you are downloading files like image, pdf, word etc, you have to save the raw response body which means Crawler shouldn’t convert it to string. To make it happen, you need to set encoding to null

var Crawler = require("crawler");
var fs = require('fs');

var c = new Crawler({
    encoding:null,
    jQuery:false,// set false to suppress warning message.
    callback:function(err, res, done){
        if(err){
            console.error(err.stack);
        }else{
            fs.createWriteStream(res.options.filename).write(res.body);
        }

        done();
    }
});

c.queue({
    uri:"https://nodejs.org/static/images/logos/nodejs-1920x1200.png",
    filename:"nodejs-1920x1200.png"
});

preRequest

If you want to do something either synchronously or asynchronously before each request, you can try the code below. Note that direct requests won’t trigger preRequest.

var c = new Crawler({
    preRequest: function(options, done) {
        // 'options' here is not the 'options' you pass to 'c.queue', instead, it's the options that is going to be passed to 'request' module 
        console.log(options);
	// when done is called, the request will start
	done();
    },
    callback: function(err, res, done) {
        if(err) {
	    console.log(err)
	} else {
	    console.log(res.statusCode)
	}
    }
});

c.queue({
    uri: 'http://www.google.com',
    // this will override the 'preRequest' defined in crawler
    preRequest: function(options, done) {
        setTimeout(function() {
	    console.log(options);
	    done();
	}, 1000)
    }
});

Advanced

Send request directly

In case you want to send a request directly without going through the scheduler in Crawler, try the code below. direct takes the same options as queue, please refer to options for detail. The difference is when calling direct, callback must be defined explicitly, with two arguments error and response, which are the same as that of callback of method queue.

crawler.direct({
    uri: 'http://www.google.com',
    skipEventRequest: false, // default to true, direct requests won't trigger Event:'request'
    callback: function(error, response) {
        if(error) {
            console.log(error)
        } else {
            console.log(response.statusCode);
        }
    }
});

Work with bottleneck

Control rate limit for with limiter. All tasks submit to a limiter will abide the rateLimit and maxConnections restrictions of the limiter. rateLimit is the minimum time gap between two tasks. maxConnections is the maximum number of tasks that can be running at the same time. Limiters are independent of each other. One common use case is setting different limiters for different proxies. One thing is worth noticing, when rateLimit is set to a non-zero value, maxConnections will be forced to 1.

var crawler = require('crawler');

var c = new Crawler({
    rateLimit: 2000,
    maxConnections: 1,
    callback: function(error, res, done) {
        if(error) {
            console.log(error)
        } else {
            var $ = res.$;
            console.log($('title').text())
        }
        done();
    }
})

// if you want to crawl some website with 2000ms gap between requests
c.queue('http://www.somewebsite.com/page/1')
c.queue('http://www.somewebsite.com/page/2')
c.queue('http://www.somewebsite.com/page/3')

// if you want to crawl some website using proxy with 2000ms gap between requests for each proxy
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/1',
    limiter:'proxy_1',
    proxy:'proxy_1'
})
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/2',
    limiter:'proxy_2',
    proxy:'proxy_2'
})
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/3',
    limiter:'proxy_3',
    proxy:'proxy_3'
})
c.queue({
    uri:'http://www.somewebsite.com/page/4',
    limiter:'proxy_1',
    proxy:'proxy_1'
})

Normally, all limiter instances in limiter cluster in crawler are instantiated with options specified in crawler constructor. You can change property of any limiter by calling the code below. Currently, we only support changing property ‘rateLimit’ of limiter. Note that the default limiter can be accessed by c.setLimiterProperty('default', 'rateLimit', 3000). We strongly recommend that you leave limiters unchanged after their instantiation unless you know clearly what you are doing.

var c = new Crawler({});
c.setLimiterProperty('limiterName', 'propertyName', value)

Class:Crawler

Event: ‘schedule’

• options Options

Emitted when a task is being added to scheduler.

crawler.on('schedule',function(options){
    options.proxy = "http://proxy:port";
});

Event: ‘limiterChange’

• options Options
• limiter String

Emitted when limiter has been changed.

Event: ‘request’

• options Options

Emitted when crawler is ready to send a request.

If you are going to modify options at last stage before requesting, just listen on it.

crawler.on('request',function(options){
    options.qs.timestamp = new Date().getTime();
});

Event: ‘drain’

Emitted when queue is empty.

crawler.on('drain',function(){
    // For example, release a connection to database.
    db.end();// close connection to MySQL
});

crawler.queue(uri|options)

• uri String
• options Options

Enqueue a task and wait for it to be executed.

crawler.queueSize

• Number

Size of queue, read-only

Options reference

You can pass these options to the Crawler() constructor if you want them to be global or as items in the queue() calls if you want them to be specific to that item (overwriting global options)

This options list is a strict superset of mikeal’s request options and will be directly passed to the request() method.

Basic request options

• options.uri: String The url you want to crawl.
• options.timeout : Number In milliseconds (Default 15000).
• All mikeal’s request options are accepted.

Callbacks

• callback(error, res, done): Function that will be called after a request was completed
  • error: Error
  • res: http.IncomingMessage A response of standard IncomingMessage includes $ and options
    • res.statusCode: Number HTTP status code. E.G.200
    • res.body: Buffer | String HTTP response content which could be a html page, plain text or xml document e.g.
    • res.headers: Object HTTP response headers
    • res.request: Request An instance of Mikeal’s Request instead of http.ClientRequest
      • res.request.uri: urlObject HTTP request entity of parsed url
      • res.request.method: String HTTP request method. E.G. GET
      • res.request.headers: Object HTTP request headers
    • res.options: Options of this task
    • $: jQuery Selector A selector for html or xml document.
  • done: Function It must be called when you’ve done your work in callback.

Schedule options

• options.maxConnections: Number Size of the worker pool (Default 10).
• options.rateLimit: Number Number of milliseconds to delay between each requests (Default 0).
• options.priorityRange: Number Range of acceptable priorities starting from 0 (Default 10).
• options.priority: Number Priority of this request (Default 5). Low values have higher priority.

Retry options

• options.retries: Number Number of retries if the request fails (Default 3),
• options.retryTimeout: Number Number of milliseconds to wait before retrying (Default 10000),

Server-side DOM options

• options.jQuery: Boolean|String|Object Use cheerio with default configurations to inject document if true or “cheerio”. Or use customized cheerio if an object with Parser options. Disable injecting jQuery selector if false. If you have memory leak issue in your project, use “whacko”, an alternative parser,to avoid that. (Default true)

Charset encoding

• options.forceUTF8: Boolean If true crawler will get charset from HTTP headers or meta tag in html and convert it to UTF8 if necessary. Never worry about encoding anymore! (Default true),
• options.incomingEncoding: String With forceUTF8: true to set encoding manually (Default null) so that crawler will not have to detect charset by itself. For example, incomingEncoding : 'windows-1255'. See all supported encodings

Cache

• options.skipDuplicates: Boolean If true skips URIs that were already crawled, without even calling callback() (Default false). This is not recommended, it’s better to handle outside Crawler use seenreq

Http headers

• options.rotateUA: Boolean If true, userAgent should be an array and rotate it (Default false)
• options.userAgent: String|Array, If rotateUA is false, but userAgent is an array, crawler will use the first one.
• options.referer: String If truthy sets the HTTP referer header
• options.removeRefererHeader: Boolean If true preserves the set referer during redirects
• options.headers: Object Raw key-value of http headers

Https socks5

const Agent = require('socks5-https-client/lib/Agent');
//...
var c = new Crawler({
    // rateLimit: 2000,
    maxConnections: 20,
    agentClass: Agent, //adding socks5 https agent
    method: 'GET',
    strictSSL: true,
    agentOptions: {
        socksHost: 'localhost',
        socksPort: 9050
    },
    // debug: true,
    callback: function (error, res, done) {
        if (error) {
            console.log(error);
        } else {
            //
        }
        done();
    }
}); 

Work with Cheerio or JSDOM

Crawler by default use Cheerio instead of JSDOM. JSDOM is more robust, if you want to use JSDOM you will have to require it require('jsdom') in your own script before passing it to crawler.

Working with Cheerio

jQuery: true //(default)
//OR
jQuery: 'cheerio'
//OR
jQuery: {
    name: 'cheerio',
    options: {
        normalizeWhitespace: true,
        xmlMode: true
    }
}

These parsing options are taken directly from htmlparser2, therefore any options that can be used in htmlparser2 are valid in cheerio as well. The default options are:

{
    normalizeWhitespace: false,
    xmlMode: false,
    decodeEntities: true
}

For a full list of options and their effects, see this and htmlparser2’s options. source

Work with JSDOM

In order to work with JSDOM you will have to install it in your project folder npm install jsdom, and pass it to crawler.

var jsdom = require('jsdom');
var Crawler = require('crawler');

var c = new Crawler({
    jQuery: jsdom
});

How to test

Crawler uses nock to mock http request, thus testing no longer relying on http server.

$ npm install
$ npm test
$ npm run cover # code coverage

Alternative: Docker

After installing Docker, you can run:

# Builds the local test environment
$ docker build -t node-crawler .

# Runs tests
$ docker run node-crawler sh -c "npm install && npm test"

# You can also ssh into the container for easier debugging
$ docker run -i -t node-crawler bash

Rough todolist

• Introducing zombie to deal with page with complex ajax
• Refactoring the code to be more maintainable
• Make Sizzle tests pass (JSDOM bug? https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom/issues#issue/81)
• Promise support
• Commander support
• Middleware support

Download Details:

Author: bda-research

GitHub: https://github.com/bda-research/node-crawler

#nodejs #node #javascript #jquery

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Evolution in Web Design: A Case Study of 25 Years - Prismetric

The term web design simply encompasses a design process related to the front-end design of website that includes writing mark-up. Creative web design has a considerable impact on your perceived business credibility and quality. It taps onto the broader scopes of web development services.

Web designing is identified as a critical factor for the success of websites and eCommerce. The internet has completely changed the way businesses and brands operate. Web design and web development go hand-in-hand and the need for a professional web design and development company, offering a blend of creative designs and user-centric elements at an affordable rate, is growing at a significant rate.

In this blog, we have focused on the different areas of designing a website that covers all the trends, tools, and techniques coming up with time.

Web design
In 2020 itself, the number of smartphone users across the globe stands at 6.95 billion, with experts suggesting a high rise of 17.75 billion by 2024. On the other hand, the percentage of Gen Z web and internet users worldwide is up to 98%. This is not just a huge market but a ginormous one to boost your business and grow your presence online.

Web Design History
At a huge particle physics laboratory, CERN in Switzerland, the son of computer scientist Barner Lee published the first-ever website on August 6, 1991. He is not only the first web designer but also the creator of HTML (HyperText Markup Language). The worldwide web persisted and after two years, the world’s first search engine was born. This was just the beginning.

Evolution of Web Design over the years
With the release of the Internet web browser and Windows 95 in 1995, most trading companies at that time saw innumerable possibilities of instant worldwide information and public sharing of websites to increase their sales. This led to the prospect of eCommerce and worldwide group communications.

The next few years saw a soaring launch of the now-so-famous websites such as Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, and substantially more. In 2004, by the time Facebook was launched, there were more than 50 million websites online.

Then came the era of Google, the ruler of all search engines introducing us to search engine optimization (SEO) and businesses sought their ways to improve their ranks. The world turned more towards mobile web experiences and responsive mobile-friendly web designs became requisite.

Let’s take a deep look at the evolution of illustrious brands to have a profound understanding of web design.

Here is a retrospection of a few widely acclaimed brands over the years.

Netflix
From a simple idea of renting DVDs online to a multi-billion-dollar business, saying that Netflix has come a long way is an understatement. A company that has sent shockwaves across Hollywood in the form of content delivery. Abundantly, Netflix (NFLX) is responsible for the rise in streaming services across 190 countries and meaningful changes in the entertainment industry.

1997-2000

The idea of Netflix was born when Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph decided to rent DVDs by mail. With 925 titles and a pay-per-rental model, Netflix.com debuts the first DVD rental and sales site with all novel features. It offered unlimited rentals without due dates or monthly rental limitations with a personalized movie recommendation system.

Netflix 1997-2000

2001-2005

Announcing its initial public offering (IPO) under the NASDAQ ticker NFLX, Netflix reached over 1 million subscribers in the United States by introducing a profile feature in their influential website design along with a free trial allowing members to create lists and rate their favorite movies. The user experience was quite engaging with the categorization of content, recommendations based on history, search engine, and a queue of movies to watch.

Netflix 2001-2005 -2003

2006-2010

They then unleashed streaming and partnering with electronic brands such as blu-ray, Xbox, and set-top boxes so that users can watch series and films straight away. Later in 2010, they also launched their sophisticated website on mobile devices with its iconic red and black themed background.

Netflix 2006-2010 -2007

2011-2015

In 2013, an eye-tracking test revealed that the users didn’t focus on the details of the movie or show in the existing interface and were perplexed with the flow of information. Hence, the professional web designers simply shifted the text from the right side to the top of the screen. With Daredevil, an audio description feature was also launched for the visually impaired ones.

Netflix 2011-2015

2016-2020

These years, Netflix came with a plethora of new features for their modern website design such as AutoPay, snippets of trailers, recommendations categorized by genre, percentage based on user experience, upcoming shows, top 10 lists, etc. These web application features yielded better results in visual hierarchy and flow of information across the website.

Netflix 2016-2020

2021

With a sleek logo in their iconic red N, timeless black background with a ‘Watch anywhere, Cancel anytime’ the color, the combination, the statement, and the leading ott platform for top video streaming service Netflix has overgrown into a revolutionary lifestyle of Netflix and Chill.

Netflix 2021

Contunue to read: Evolution in Web Design: A Case Study of 25 Years

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Why You Should Stop Writing Server-Based Web Apps

Let’s take a look at a typical web request. A person follows a link. The request goes to the web server. The web server runs some code and figures out what view to render. The server fetches some data from a database and combines the data with a template. Finally, the server renders the response as HTML and sends it back to the browser. Sounds simple enough, right?

As you may know, any application beyond “Hello World” starts getting very complicated very fast. Often, one request creates multiple calls to a database or other internal APIs. More calls to databases and services mean more network latency. There could be frustrating caches at multiple levels attempting to solve performance problems. There could be multiple web servers behind a load balancer, making deployments more difficult.

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