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Featured Article- A Fond Look at 90′s Web Design

A fond, nostalgic look back at 1990′s web design, and a stark warning to anyone whose current website is an accidental anachronism.
Remember the time when every single PC was beige, every website had a small Netscape icon on the homepage, Geocities and Tripod hosted every single personal homepage, and “Google” was simply a strange-sounding word?
The mid to late 90s were the playful childhood years of the internet, a time of huge expectations for the future and fairly low standards for the present. This was a time when doing a web search meant poring over several pages of listings rather than looking at the first three results–but at least fairly few of those websites were unashamedly profit-driven.

Hallmarks of 1990s Web Design.

Of course, when someone mentions that a site looks like it came from 1997, it’s no compliment. You begin to imagine loud background images, and small “email me” mailboxes with envelopes going in and out in a seemingly endless loop. Amateurish, silly, very unprofessional, conceited, and completely unusable all describe how most web design produced just 15 years ago.
Why was web design so bad back then? Knowledge. Few people knew how to create a good website back then.

Difficulty.

Back in those days, there was hardly any software or templates that could create a visually pleasing, user friendly website in a short space of time. Instead, web designers had to either hand-coded their sites in Notepad or use FrontPage.

Dizzyness.

When a new toy was released, whether it was Flash, Java, JavaScript, Frames or animated Gifs, it was always crammed into an already overfilled toy box of a website, regardless of if it served any purpose.
Looking through the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, it’s difficult not to feel a pang of nostalgia for an easier time when we were all beginners at this. However, one of the greatest reasons for looking at 1990s web design is to avoid repeating history’s web design mistakes. This would be a helpful task for the unfortunate number of today’s personal websites and even small business websites that are accidentally retro.

Splash Pages.

Sometime around ’98, websites all over the internet started using Flash in their web design, the software that gave way for simple animation of images on a website. All of a sudden, you could no longer visit half the websites on the internet without sitting through thirty seconds of a logo bouncing, revolving, sliding, glinting or bouncing across the page.
Flash “splash pages,” as these start up animations were called, became the internet’s version of holiday pictures. Everyone revelled in displaying Flash on their site, and everyone else hated to have to sit through it.
Of all the 1000′s of splash pages made in the ’90s and the stark few still made today, almost none ever communicated any helpful information or provided any entertainment. They were simply monuments to the egos of the websites’ owners. Still, today, when so many website owners are working so hard to drain every last bit of effectiveness from their sites web design, it’s almost endearing to think of a business owner actually putting ego ahead of the profit to have been gained from all the visitors who pressed the “back” button rather than sit through another animated logo.

Text Troubles ”Welcome to…”

Every single web design in the 1990′s had to have the word “welcome” somewhere, often in the biggest headline. After all, isn’t saying “welcome” more important than saying what the website is all about in the first place?

Background images.

Remember all the people who had their children’s pictures tiled in the background of every single page? Remember how fun it was trying to guess what the words were in the areas where the font colour and the colour of the image were the same? Web design nightmare.

Dark background, light text.

My favourite web design, was an orange font on a purple background, though the classic yellow or white text on blue, green or red was lovely, too. Of course, anyone who will make their text more difficult to read with a silly gimmick is just letting you know they couldn’t possibly have anything worth reading on their site.
Whole paragraphs of text centered. After all, haven’t 1000′s of years of flush-left margins just made our eyes lazy?
“This Site Is Best Viewed in Netscape 4.66, 1,000×3300 resolution.” It was always so sweet when web design folk actually thought anyone but their mothers would care enough about the site to change their browser configuration to look at some random person’s website.

All-image no-text publishing.

Some of the poorer websites would actually do the world the favour by putting all their text in images so that no search engine known to man would ever find them. What a sacrifice!

Hyperactive Pages.

TV-envy was a frequent psychological issue in 1990s web design. Since streaming video and Flash were still taking baby steps, web designers settled for just making the contents on their pages move like jumping beans.

Animated Gifs.

In 1996, just before the start of Flash, animated gifs were all the rage in web design, dancing, scrolling, and sliding their way across the eyeballs of web users trying to read the text on the page.

Scrolling Text.

Just in case  it was too easy to tune out all the singing, dancing graphics on the site, an ambitious mid-1990s web design chap had an easy but powerful trick for giving you a major headache: scrolling text. Through the power of JavaScript, website owners could master the perfect combination of too fast to read easily and too slow to read quickly.
For a time, a business owner could separate the serious from the not so serious prospects based solely on how (un)professional their business web design was. Of course, there are, even now, some sites whose owners seem to be trying to bring back background images, ugly text and animated gifs. You’ll simply have to trust that we are all laughing with them, not at them.