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90s_Web_Design_A_Nostalgic_Look_Back
| 90s Web Design: A Nostalgic Look Back
A nostalgic look back at 90s web design, and a warning to anyone
whose website is an accidental anachronism.
Remember the days when every PC was beige, every website had a
little Netscape icon on the homepage, Geocities and Tripod
hosted just about every single personal homepage, and "Google"
was just a funny-sounding word?
The mid-late 1990s were the playful childhood of the worldwide
web, a time of great expectations for the future and pretty low
standards for the present. Those were the days when doing a web
search meant poring through several pages of listings rather
than glancing at the first three results--but at least
relatively few of those websites were unabashedly profit-driven.
Hallmarks of 1990s Web Design
Of course, when someone says that a website looks like it came
from 1996, it's no compliment. You start to imagine loud
background images, and little "email me" mailboxes with letters
going in and out in an endless loop. Amateurish, silly,
unprofessional, conceited, and unusable are all adjectives that
pretty well describe how most websites were made just ten years
ago.
Why were websites so bad back then?
Knowledge. Few people knew how to build a good website back
then, before authorities like Jakob Nielsen starting
evangelizing their studies of web user behavior. Difficulty. In
those days, there weren't abundant software and templates that
could produce a visually pleasing, easy-to-use website in 10
minutes. Instead, you either hand-coded your site in Notepad or
used FrontPage. Giddiness. When a new toy came out, whether it
was JavaScript, Java, Frames, animated Gifs, or Flash, it was
simply crammed into an already overstuffed toy box of a website,
regardless of whether it served any purpose. Browsing through
the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, it's hard not to feel a
twinge of nostalgia for a simpler time when we were all
beginners at this. Still, one of the best reasons for looking at
90s website design is to avoid repeating history's web design
mistakes. This would be a useful exercise for the tragic number
of today's personal homepages and even small business websites
that are accidentally retro.
Splash Pages
Sometime around 1998, websites all over the internet discovered
Flash, the software that allowed for easy animation of images on
a website. Suddenly you could no longer visit half the pages on
the web without sitting through at least thirty seconds of a
logo revolving, glinting, sliding, or bouncing across the screen.
Flash "splash pages," as these opening animations were called,
became the internet's version of vacation pictures. Everyone
loved to display Flash on their site, and everyone hated to have
to sit through someone else's Flash presentation.
Of all the thousands of splash pages made in the 1990s and the
few still made today, hardly any ever communicated any useful
information or provided any entertainment. They were monuments
to the egos of the websites' owners. Still, today, when so many
business website owners are working so hard to wring every last
bit of effectiveness out of their sites, it's almost charming to
think of a business owner actually putting ego well ahead of the
profit to have been derived from all the visitors who hit the
"back" button rather than sit through an animated logo.
Text Troubles
"Welcome to..." Every single website homepage in 1996 had to
have the word "welcome" somewhere, often in the largest
headline. After all, isn't saying "welcome" more vital than
saying what the web page is all about in the first place?
Background images. Remember all those people who had their kids'
pictures tiled in the background of every page? Remember how
much fun it was trying to guess what the words were in the
sections where the font color and the color of the image were
the same? Dark background, light text. My favorite was orange
font on purple background, though the ubiquitous yellow white
text on blue, green or red was nice, too. Of course, anyone who
will make their text harder to read with a silly gimmick is just
paying you the courtesy of letting you know they couldn't
possibly have written anything worth reading. Entire paragraphs
of text centered. After all, haven't millennia of flush-left
margins just made our eyes lazy? "This Site Is Best Viewed in
Netscape 4.666, 1,000x3300 resolution." It was always so cute
when site owners actually imagined anyone but their mothers
would care enough to change their browser set up to look at some
random person's website. All-image no-text publishing. Some of
the worst websites would actually do the world the service of
putting all their text in image format so that no search engine
would ever find them. What sacrifice!
Hyperactive Pages
TV-envy was a common psychological malady in 1990s web design.
Since streaming video and even Flash were still in their
infancy, web designers settled for simply making the elements on
their pages move like Mexican jumping beans.
Animated Gifs
In 1996, just before the dawn of Flash, animated gifs were in
full swing, dancing, sliding, and scrolling their way across the
retinas of web surfers trying to read the text on the page.
Scrolling Text
Just in case you were having a too easy time tuning out all the
dancing graphics on the page, an ambitious mid-1990s web
designer had a simple but powerful trick for giving you a
headache: scrolling text. Through the magic of JavaScript,
website owners could achieve the perfect combination of too fast
to read comfortably and too slow to read quickly.
For a while, a business owner could even separate the serious
from the wannabe prospects based just on how (un)professional
their business websites looked. Sadly, the development of
template-based website authoring software means that even
someone with no taste or sense whatsoever can make websites that
look as good as the most biggest-budget design of five years ago.
Of course, there are still some websites whose owners seem to be
trying to spark a resurgence in animated gifs, background
images, and ugly text. 'll just have to trust that everyone is
laughing with them, not at them.
About the author:
About the author: If you want to avoid these mistakes in your
website Joel Walsh recommends you check out
http://www.ezgenerator.com/documents/167.html?%20web%20authoring%
20software[Publish this article on your website! Requirement:
live link for above URL/web address w/ link text/anchor text:
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