I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint.
I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in fact most do not. Compare this site with a random page from the ReadWrite's new design[1] which doesn't even load its initial content until after the page has loaded (!) and gives 50% of its x axis to ads and links to other unrelated pages on the site (which contain more ads of course).
I don't want informational websites to continue to load stuff a second or five seconds after the page has loaded. I don't want them to load new content when my mouse floats over a div. I don't want a sitemap that is omnipresent as I scroll down an article.
I'm a big fan of the Contrast Rebellion[2] and kind of feel like something in the same spirit is needed for static websites. I miss the non-interactive web.
I'm in the same boat as you. I absolutely _love_ developing sites JavaScript-free on the first pass. It really makes you realize how much of a crutch it's been that you've depended on, and how much you can get away with these days without it, especially with the rise of newer CSS features in the last couple of years.
At the end of the day you're left with a very fast and clean site that you can, after careful consideration, add very tiny JS snippets to in order to improve UX in places.
Various publications tout low intensity, medium/low-contrast as a tool to reduce eyestrain. IMHO, default font size, line spacing and column width are more important than high contrast (somewhat of a problem on this site too)
Thought: should we aim to vary contrast by device?
On my mobile phone I prefer sites with higher contrast, especially when out and about, on my retina iPad however, sites with white backgrounds and lots of text are much more tiring/difficult to process (plus bright screens, incl. tablets and phones are shown to result in insomnia [1]).
At the risk of going completely O/T here, f.lux [2] has helped me a lot in this respect.
I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update links and I'm only at <50 pages!
MacOS X people might want to investigate Eastgate Systems Tinderbox. Can handle the navigation links for huge ad-hoc Web sites using a local template then generate the Web pages.
I use Linux at home, and use a couple of bash scripts to make the index page and navigation links on individual pages that I write in markdown (but can hand edit html if the mood takes me).
Windows: powershell? A few scripts for indexing?
There are also large, flexible applications such as jekyl that can generate static Web sites.
It's one of those things that every time I look at templating, I get overwhelmed and my procrastination says that the time it would take me to learn templating would be better served coding the site...
I was even more impressed by the original WWW documents posted by Tim Berners-Lee that hit HN a few months back.
The pages had no rendering or layout, just strictly semantic markup.
They were an absolute joy to read.
The present-day Web is climbing a tower of Babel and reaching baroque levels of ostentation. I see a great re-settling, quite likely as the Web bifurcates into a documentation platform, for information, and an application platform. Most of the Web is still really just static docs.
I'm with you for the most part but I find that #fff background with #000 text is pretty harsh on my eyes. I think there is a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
The biggest problem with readability for me lately is awful Google Fonts which never render right.
This site has archives of campaign websites, website features, and campaign ads.
I think it's fascinating to see the paradigm shifts in web design indicated by these four-year gaps. And campaigns being a temporary thing, I think they perfectly encapsulate the design of the "era". I was going through the years and was thinking "sure, a lot changed from 1996 to 2000, so of course the sites will look a lot different but there is no way 2008 is that much different than 2012". Wrong. I think this is just what happens when you see web design evolve slowly over four years -- you don't think it's changed that much. Then you actually see a site in 2008 vs. 2012 and realize the difference.
The 1996 Phil Graham and Pat Buchanan sites look like classic Geocities-style design!
The stark differences in design of the nominated candidates vs. the ones who lost in the primaries. This gap seems to have been most apparent in 1996 and 2000, during the bubble, when top-tier web designers were probably insanely expensive.
> "There's no doubt we'll look back at Web sites today and basically say ... that they were quite primitive. They don't customize what they present to the viewers' interests. They don't remember: Have you been there before? What have you seen before? And that's got to change." -- Bill Gates, MSNBC, July 15, 1996
Not sure whether to laugh or to cry, thinking that just a while ago a politician called attention to this as though it were a fixable problem...were things really so different 16 years ago?
I was going to ask: "so how is it that the average non-commercial site can be expected to crash upon reaching ten HN upvotes but this 1996 is still chugging along strong" After all, this was well before such thing as CDNs were in wide use.
Then I looked at the source and saw that it's a Frontpage site.
* This brings back memories of when you could get at least $50/hr to make something like this.
The average non-commercial site these days is based on an unoptimized Wordpress installation that loads 137 PHP files and does 18 DB reqests to render its main page. This 1996 gem is entirely static content. That's a few orders of magnitude less work for the server to do right there. And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
> And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
And this is the big thing right here. We're running sites designed to be basically usable when served by 1996 hardware on systems orders of magnitude faster with almost two decades' worth of optimizations compared to what was acceptable in 1996. I don't know how much NTFS has changed since then, but filesystems in the Linux world have undergone a sea change in that timeframe, which is directly relevant to how quickly a static page can be served.
I imagine the only real thing at play here is the number of connections the server software is configured to handle. This site has a small handful of small static assets: there's no server-side render, and I'd put money on everything being cached even if no such server-side optimizations have been made (done at the disk and/or OS level).
I'd bet the only limiting factor of '96 hardware would be the NIC, all else being equal. Webserver software was a lot less complicated back then, so its memory footprint was far smaller.
That's a good thing for today's hackers and activists to review. It shows the long-term agenda of the government in wanting to have ubiquitous surveillance powers. And it shows you can win some of these battles.
Can you imagine a web without SSL? Today people openly call for all sites to do https all the time, but in the 90s, a web server (or even a web browser) that could do https in a non-broken fashion was officially a dangerous munition. To do this basic thing you had to cobble some open source software together, kind of like how people do it with ffmpeg and implementations of closed-source codecs today.
Total badass. A few months ago I saw a gallery of screenshots taken from 'wayback machine' of a whole bunch of old websites. Netflix, Dell, and Apple look COMPLETELY different. What's surprising (or maybe not) is that Amazon 7 years ago looks almost exactly the same. Thanks for sharing the Dole / Kemp campaign site - brings back fond memories. Heres's the gallery if you're interested... http://www.shopify.com/blog/6464492-the-ecommerce-graveyard-...
I've always wondered, what's the best looking website of the 1990s? Was there anything that people would deem as "good" as some of today's top designs?
I feel like there had to be at least someone with a very refined sense of aesthetic making awesome websites back then.
Drudge Report. Even if you don't like the political "lean" of it (I, personally, don't), you have to appreciate a design that has (basically) stayed the same since it was founded in the mid 90s. The "minimalism" from Drudge had a big impact on a lot of modern web design.
At the time the web was only a couple of years old and it was yet to even hit the "lets get serious" radar of just about everyone.
Essentially, no. There was no one with a very refined aesthetic making websites at the time. Even the Louvre's website (one of the first art museum websites I remember popping up) was extremely ugly.
This is quite nice for a 1996 website. I guess it shows how much the development of (nice) web design was held back by a combination of the ~2000 flashpocalypse and IE6.
I was thinking it holds up quite well, compared to my subjective memory of websites from that vintage. There are no scrolling banners or other dancing garbage (with the exception of one animated GIF that is relatively restrained), and the layout wouldn't look out of place today if the elements had a bit more room to breathe.
Even the markup is surprisingly clean:
* Most tag names are lowercase
* Attributes are double-quoted
* Some style attributes with CSS
I'm surprised to see FrontPage generated this code - I remember it being more gnarly than this. That said, I'm enjoying the historical artifacts:
* Table-based layout
* <font> tags
* <body> tag has background, vlink and alink attributes
The tightness of the layout probably stems from low resolution screens. In '96 the most typical display size was something around 640x480 or 800x600, not a lot of room to breathe there.
In the last month, I've had 2 people tell me (unsolicited of course) that my website looks like it was made 10 years ago.
I went to this 1996 campaign site and said with dismay, it looks like my website.
I recognized many of of the above historical attributes (table-based layout, centered narrow, body bgcolor attribute) in my own site.
I've got a full-time job as a UNIX system administrator, and a part-time business training sys admins. I don't have the website redesign merit badge or time to earn one. I'd pay for a redesign but I don't even know what to ask for except "a website that presents my company well". And I want people to stop staring at my website like there is something wrong with it.
Would appreciate any help you can offer, either by recommending a designer or a design, please.
If you don't mind looking a bit like other sites, I'd highly recommend using bootstrap as a basis for a modern-looking redesign. You can customize it to your will, or even buy some bootstrap-based layouts to work with for not much money: https://wrapbootstrap.com/
As someone who learned table-based layouts and who now designs using HTML5 and CSS3, rest assured that the "new" web is not that hard to learn as long as you understand the basics of css. And almost all your JavaScript skills will transfer. It's really as easy as picking up a book on HTML5 and reading it. Alternately, check out: http://diveintohtml5.info/
Unless your site is a differentiator for your business, I wouldn't go hog-wild on it. I'd start by looking at something like ThemeForest, where you can browse around, see if you find something you like, and buy it for not-a-lot-of-money.
I doubt anyone would have used CSS in 1996, and "FrontPage 6.0 [2003]" did not exist back then. FrontPage might have only been used as part of the archival process (for removing links to dynamically generated pages and other excluded content and adding a fourth footer line to every page).
The thing that stands out to me is that the text styles are basically browser default, in particular the Times New Roman (i.e. serif) font, and that distinctive dark blue for all links. Most sites use sans-serif fonts, which are more readable at lower resolutions. While most sites retain blue as the color for in-line links, links that are structural (e.g. the menus on left and right) tend to be given styles more akin to the rest of the site.
Also those graphics would be JPG on a modern site, not GIF. The lower bit depth on the colors is quite apparent.
Although other than knowing it's running IIS (which is in the Server header of the responses anyway), it's not particularly useful. Unlike modern web apps, it's not displaying a stack trace or debug information that contains db connection strings and the like.
Also, this is fixed by changing one line in web.config AFAIK (it's been a good five years since I worked with IIS in any capacity)
"Like no President since Lincoln, he will bring to the Presidency the values and principles of all Americans."
Politicians have always and will always make great claims and comparisons and appeals to authority, history, etc., but I can't imagine a modern campaign (on either side) just flat our saying our guy is the best thing since Lincoln.
And today far too many people are salivating at the idea of gutting the Voting Rights Act.
On the other hand, one of the longest pages is on the drug war (in support of extending and intensifying it). It's hard to imagine a Republican making that a central plank in their platform, either.
Well, Bob Dole's campaign didn't have to deal with movies like "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or "Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies." Though maybe "Bob Dole: Liberal Slayer" would have been a better campaign platform? ;-)
I don't have a hard time believing that someone signed up for some sort of annual billing and never bothered to cancel it. Perhaps they host a whole bunch of stuff with the same company and simply pay their bills without double checking ever line item.
One way it reads very different to me is the way all of the sources are (in parenthesis) directly after the statements. I don't read a lot of campaign websites but I've not seen one that has so many direct sources for this many statements.
"Believe that? America can do better. Bob Dole. Jack Kemp.
Cutting income taxes on every family 15%. A 500 dollar per child tax credit.
Higher take home pay. Bob Dole. Cut taxes. Balance the budget. Raise take home pay. Tell the truth."
What's interesting to me about these old sites is how bad the typography is. Why is it that sites started using decent typefaces only relatively recently? Print design was just as well understood back then.
I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in fact most do not. Compare this site with a random page from the ReadWrite's new design[1] which doesn't even load its initial content until after the page has loaded (!) and gives 50% of its x axis to ads and links to other unrelated pages on the site (which contain more ads of course).
I don't want informational websites to continue to load stuff a second or five seconds after the page has loaded. I don't want them to load new content when my mouse floats over a div. I don't want a sitemap that is omnipresent as I scroll down an article.
I'm a big fan of the Contrast Rebellion[2] and kind of feel like something in the same spirit is needed for static websites. I miss the non-interactive web.
[1]http://readwrite.com/2012/11/14/if-foxconn-replaced-its-huma... [2]http://contrastrebellion.com/