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.
Think of the times 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 World Wide Web, a time of great expectations for the future and pretty low standards for the present. Those were the days when it was meant to search the Internet through multiple pages listings Poring instead look at the first three results – but at least relatively few of these sites unabashedly profit-driven.
Characteristic of Web-design of the 1990s
Of course, if someone says that a website looks like it came from 1996, it is not a compliment. You start to imagine loud background images, and little "email me" mailboxes with letters and went out in an endless loop. Amateurish, silly, unprofessional, conceited, and unusable are all adjectives that describe fairly well how most websites were made just ten years.
Why sites were so bad then?
Knowledge. Few people knew how to build one good website back then, starting before authorities like Jakob Nielsen evangelizing their studies of web user behavior.
Difficulty. In those days there were not abundant software and templates that could produce a visually attractive, easy to use website in 10 minutes. Instead, you either hand-coded your site in Notepad or FrontPage.
Dizziness. When a new toy came out, whether it was JavaScript, Java, frames, animated GIFs or Flash, it was simply crammed into an already crowded toy box of a website, regardless of whether it served any purpose.
Surf the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, it's hard not to be a tinge of nostalgia for a simpler time, when we were all beginners at this feeling. Nevertheless, one of the best reasons for looking at 90s website design of repeating the history of Web design mistakes to avoid. This would be a useful exercise for the tragic number of today's personal homepages and even small business websites that just happen to be retro.
Splash Pages
Sometime around 1998, pages all over the internet discovered Flash, the software allows 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, sparkling, sliding or bouncing across the screen.
Flash "splash pages" as these opening animations were called, was the Internet version of vacation pictures. Everyone loved to display Flash on their site, and all hate to have to sit through someone else's Flash presentation.
Of all the thousands of splash pages in the 1990s and the few still made today, hardly ever communicated any useful information or provided any trips made. They were monuments to the egos of the websites' owners. Even today, when so many business website owners are working so hard to wring every last bit of effectiveness of their Web sites, it is almost charming in fact to the owner of a company putting ego well ahead of think of the profit to have been obtained from all visitors, press the "Back" button instead of sitting through an animated logo.
Text Troubles
"Welcome to …" Every single website homepage in 1996 had the word "welcome" somewhere, most often in the headline. Finally, it is not to say "welcome" more important than to say that rotates the Web page is all about in the first place?
Background images. Remember all those people that their children had pictures tiled in the background of every page? Remember how much fun it was difficult to guess what were the words 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 was in blue, green or red is also nice. Of course, who will make their texts more difficult with a silly gimmick is just paying you the courtesy of letting you know, they could not possibly be read written something worth reading.
Entire paragraphs of text centered. Finally, do not have thousands of flush-left margins just our eyes lazy?
"This site is best viewed in Netscape 4th 666, 1000 x3300 resolution." It was always so cute when site owners actually imagined anyone but their mothers would care enough to change their browser to search for some random person on site.
All-image no-text publishing. do some of the worst websites would actually the world the service of implementing all their text in image format so that no search engine would ever find. What sacrifice!
Hyperactive Pages
TV-envy was a common mental illness in web design of the 1990s. Since streaming video and even Flash were still in their infancy, web designers make the elements simply move on their sides, like Mexican jumping beans processed.
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
Only if You are a time to dance easy tuning of all the graphics on the page, an ambitious mid-1990s web designer had a simple but powerful trick type 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.
could for a while, even the owner of a company seriously interested separated from the wannabe just like (looked un) professional their business websites. Unfortunately, means the development of template-based website authoring software means that even someone with no taste or no sense to sites that can be as good as most of the largest budget-design look like five years ago.
Of course there are some sites that seem to be owned by trying a resurgence in animated GIFs, backgrounds, spark, text, and ugly. "All must only trust that everyone laughing with them, they are not.
