|
||||||
|
||||||
|
90s Web Design: A Nostalgic Look BackA 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[Publishthis article on your website!Requirement:live link for above URL/web address w/ link text/anchor text:"web authoring software" OR leave this bracketed message] Circulated by Article Emporium Mistakes To Avoid In Your Ebay Auctions Online auctions continue to grow in popularity as an easy and efficient way to make money on everything from unwanted household items to rare and expensive collectables and even to bulky items like cars. Log on to eBay and you will see countless auctions on any item you ... 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 ho... How To Shop and Save On Website Hosting - by Jim Edwards (c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved http://www.thenetreporter.com ===================================== "What's your web address?" From small "mom and pop" home-based businesses to mega- stores, people ask this question... Is Your Website Blacklisted? A blacklist, as the name implies, is a list of people or companies who have met with the disapproval of others. In the online world a blacklist refers to those people who have been marked as responsible for generating spam in a very big way. Blacklists are also known as blocklists.... Choosing data recovery company Choosing a data recovery company. There are many different factors to consider when choosing a data recovery company. All of them may have strong advantages in some areas but be weaker or less efficient in others. If this is your first time choosing a data recover... The History Of Solar Power With the recent rise in energy costs many people have been looking to alternative sources of energy. One of the greatest energy sources (our sun) is readily available for the taking. We just need to be able to harness it's power. For those interested, below is a brief history of ho... DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) - Description DSL is a type of broadband technology that allows for digital data to be sent at high speeds along already-existing copper telephone lines, while allowing for the transmission of analog (voice) data at the same time. Some of the most common variations on DSL include ADSL, HDSL, SDS... M-Commerce Twice the Cash Value of E-Commerce Do you even know what M-Commerce is? Well you better learn fast. Predictions in Europe for M-Commerce, the second largest market behind Asia, are for a spend of €7.4 Billion in 2006 that's over $8 Billion. That's twice the predicted spend of traditional web services! ... SEO - What You Should Not Do SEO is one of the economic ways to get your url listed on the top of free search engines. That is why SEO become so important. There are tons of guidance in SEO on the internet. But in the other hand, there are also misguidance in SEO. They always say to optimize, optimize and opti... Passing The CCNA and CCNP Exams: Cisco Home Lab FAQ There is a real revolution today among CCNA and CCNP candidates. More and more of you are turning your back on "router simulators" and putting your own CCNA and/or CCNP Home Lab together, which is the best way to totally prepare to pass these tough Cisco exams. I get hund... Data-Recovery: What You Need Data recovery is something we hope that we will never need. Whether you simply make the mistake of deleting important software or you lose it all in a computer crash, that valuable asset of information may seem like it is lost forever. But, if you have complete and quality data-rec... Broadband TV a World of Choice Broadband television is a means of providing TV programs via the Internet. It is possible to view live terrestrial television channels, but it is more practical to us it to see programs that have already been transmitted, so avoiding the need to set your video recorder. To get Broa... Why journal writing on the Web? Blogs are journals giving anyone an identity, and an awesome forum for sharing thoughts and ideas with others of similar interests. Journal writing used to be a private, personal experience done late at night, scribbling hardly legible thoughts and daily occurrences down o... Register now to avoid disappointment Any successfully business person will tell you that one of the keys to a successful business is to plan ahead. With all the work and planing that has to be done, it can be easy to overlook some of the smaller points. Registering domain names is not something that traditionally has ... Protect Yourself with a Porn Filter The harmful affects of pornography use and addiction are well documented by science. As with most things in life, prevention is the most effective way to avoid ever having a problem with pornography. The internet is a wonderful place to access information, read updated new...
|
|
|||||
|
||||||