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.

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Today, the best way to reach to the every corner of this world is by developing a website.

Web designing is a critical decision:

Today, the best way to reach to the every corner of this world is by developing a website. It will just be a matter of few clicks and you will be in front of anyone who may be sitting anywhere in this world. That is the charisma of internet and websites. However, when you talk about websites, it doesn’t mean that all you need is a web space with a particular domain name; in fact, there are a lot of other things that have to be kept in mind.

Visual appeal of your website will be the first thing that will earn you a lot of visitors. Secondly, it will be the systematic approach that you must use in presenting the web contents and information about your products as that will make you to convert those visitors in regular buyers. So, it is all about web designing in the most effective way. If you are looking to design a website, then the first option that you can always choose is to hire a professional who may let you bring your dream into reality. However, you can also do that on your own if you are having some previous knowledge about web designing. Apparently, it’s all about creativity, but, in reality, it’s much more than creativity as it requires a certain level of proficiency in dealing with specific designing tools.

Nevertheless, you can find these tools online and can proceed with your web designing. Also, spending some time on reading the tutorials on using some specific tools will always help. Also, there are so many languages and scripts that have to be understood in order to create a nice and unbeatable web design. You can also choose as if you require static web pages or dynamic web pages.

However, it will be relatively difficult and will involve greater awareness about technologies to create dynamic web pages as you may have to use JavaScript, Actionscript and other such scripting to make your web site lively.

To create dynamic contents, flash is another thing that can be used and in most situations, it will be the better idea to do that as there are some softwares that help you to produce graphics according to your liking. Although, it takes some time and efforts to produce a dynamic page with flash animations, but, it can really uplift the visual appeal of your website which is absolutely important.

However, when you will be designing your website, you must understand that it should not include so many heavy graphics including pictures and other electronic contents as they can hinder the speed of your web site. It is the basic thing of designing a web page as if your site will take time to get loaded, you will end up losing customers as no one have the time to wait for your site to load, especially, when they have other options to explore.

So, keep it simple, yet powerful along with a simple and comprehensible navigational structure which is momentous as well. Also, pay a sufficient attention to scaling and color scheme of your website to exude that professionalism that can grip the imagination of a casual visitor.

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