Title: 90s Web Design: A Nostalgic Look Back Word Count: 1023 Summary: A nostalgic look back at 90s

web design, and a warning to anyone whose website i s an accidental anachronism. Remember the days when every PC was beige, every website had a little Netscape i con on the homepage, Geocities and Tripod hosted just about every single persona l homepage, and "Google" was just a funny-sounding word? The mid-late 1990s were the playful childhood of the worldwide web, a time of gr eat expectations for the future and pretty low standards for the pre... Keywords:

Article Body: A nostalgic look back at 90s web design, and a warning to anyone whose website i s an accidental anachronism. Remember the days when every PC was beige, every website had a little Netscape i con on the homepage, Geocities and Tripod hosted just about every single persona l homepage, and "Google" was just a funny-sounding word? The mid-late 1990s were the playful childhood of the worldwide web, a time of gr eat 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 list ings rather than glancing at the first three results--but at least relatively fe w 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 n o 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 desc ribe 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 authori ties like Jakob Nielsen starting evangelizing their studies of web user behavior . Difficulty. In those days, there weren't abundant software and templates that co uld 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, ani mated 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. Stil

l, one of the best reasons for looking at 90s website design is to avoid repeati ng 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 are that o longer seconds around 1998, websites all over the internet discovered Flash, the softw allowed for easy animation of images on a website. Suddenly you could n visit half the pages on the web without sitting through at least thirty of a logo revolving, glinting, sliding, or bouncing across the screen.

Flash "splash pages," as these opening animations were called, became the intern et'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 to day, hardly any ever communicated any useful information or provided any enterta inment. They were monuments to the egos of the websites' owners. Still, today, w hen 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 a ll the visitors who hit the "back" button rather than sit through an animated lo go. 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" mor e 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 wh at the words were in the sections where the font color and the color of the imag e were the same? Dark background, light text. My favorite was orange font on purple background, t hough the ubiquitous yellow white text on blue, green or red was nice, too. Of c ourse, anyone who will make their text harder to read with a silly gimmick is ju st paying you the courtesy of letting you know they couldn't possibly have writt en anything worth reading. Entire paragraphs of text centered. After all, haven't millennia of flush-left m argins just made our eyes lazy? "This Site Is Best Viewed in Netscape 4.666, 1,000x3300 resolution." It was alwa ys so cute when site owners actually imagined anyone but their mothers would car e 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 w orld the service of putting all their text in image format so that no search eng ine would ever find them. What sacrifice! Hyperactive Pages TV-envy was a common psychological malady in 1990s web design. Since streaming v ideo and even Flash were still in their infancy, web designers settled for simpl y 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, dancin g, 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 tric k for giving you a headache: scrolling text. Through the magic of JavaScript, we bsite owners could achieve the perfect combination of too fast to read comfortab ly and too slow to read quickly. For a while, a business owner could even separate the serious from the wannabe p rospects based just on how (un)professional their business websites looked. Sadl y, 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.