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: 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 |
