1990s-2000s Era Website Design

Discussion and links concerning retro web design. I have resources aplenty but I want to know more about how the structure of these sites could be characterized, what design philosophies they followed, what software was used to make them, where their image and animated resources typically came from and what programs were used to create these images/animations. Resources/inspiration: >https://wiby.me/surprise/ >https://makefrontendsoykafagain.party/ >http://blog.geocities.institute/ >http://www.oocities.org/ >http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ >http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/mail/ >http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/dingbats/ >https://neocities.org/ >http://www.constellation7.org/ (pictured) >https://www.cameronsworld.net/

>>15092 I love soykaf like this. But wouldn't you think this thread is more suited to /vis/?

>>15097 It could be. I am coming here from the perspective of an occasional webdev trying to recreate the feeling of these sites, and I'm also interested in the technology that limited this form of visual media, but I can see how it could belong on /vis/. If a couple people really want me to move it I will.

https://winworldpc.com/library/applications/tag-graphics

I've been studying this a little more, and it seems like many of the graphics on sites like this were made in the 90s or even 80s and shared and remixed across multiple operating systems and graphics editors, giving them their unique eclectic feel. I'm going to put together a few VMware images with these old graphics editors so people can make their own old web graphics across multiple systems. Unfortunately Virtualbox does not work well with Windows 98 at all, even with heavy configuration, but I'm sure you cal all get a copy of VMware easily. I'm starting with Windows 98, because it's a good middle ground between one of the older Windows systems and one with fairly new software that would have been used in the early 2000s, so it should work well as its own standalone tool. However I am having problems with cracking Macromedia Fireworks 3. If anyone remembers an old Warez site I could get a crack from, let me know. And sites other than winpcworld with old website/graphics software would be good, since it doesn't have anything from XP and it's missing a lot of information and software pre-2000 too.

>>15092 > I want to know more about how the structure of these sites could be characterized, what design philosophies they followed, what software was used to make them dude, they just opened notepad and typed html... in the worse case they used frontpage. >I've been studying this a little more, wow... i am 21 but i feel like 80 rn.

Posting some nice images.

>>15108 I'm looking for a more comprehensive meta-analysis of how these sites were actually structured, if such a thing exists. I know how the sites were created, I had my own geocities, angelfire, and self hosted sites. But the way in which amateur web design was influenced by the various technical and social influences has been lost to time, and I don't want to miss the nuances. Surely professionals must have had some learning materials they referenced as well that I could look at to see where they were coming from. There's also the matter of the image resources they use and how they were created and found. Look at sites like Cameron's World and Make Frontend soykaf Again. Sure, they look pretty nostalgic, but they just reuse assets that were already created and do not have the layout at all of a classic site. Sure, I can just open up Notepad and start typing again using only IE9 features. Will it be anything like what a 13 year old me on a brand new internet connection would write? No. I can also just open up old sites and read their source code, but I'm hoping that this has been done and analyzed already.

>>15111 Oh, also, I'm 27. I'm just saying that because you seem to have mistaken me for some toddler who just discovered Web 1.0 and doesn't know what HTML is.

>>15111 Sorry to be boring, but I think nearly everything in mid-late 90s website design style can be explained by slow user connections, no css, and lazy imitation leading to personal websites to use the same setup with frames, tiled backgrounds, and dividers. The technical reasons why everything looked how it did are pretty blunt and I don't think there's a lot of deep social analysis to be had apart from people copying each other and lacking the technical ability to innovate. I remember professional pages from that era and they pretty much just used tables to jump ahead in time to what everyone would do 5-10 years later with CSS2. The old web style died off because because standards advanced and made that kind of design available to everyone, not because it old geocities pages really reflected the period.

>>15114 No, you're right, it is simple and it's a good explanation. It's good to catalog anyways. There are a lot of common features on these old sites that I was also trying to enumerate and expand on, but I am remembering more as I dig back into this and I think that they are self explanatory: >adhoc navigation >guestbooks >award sections >icons that show what technology the site supports >cheesy, drawn out introductory pages >poorly laid out inline images >banner links to sister sites >graphics inside of the layout everywhere >icons inside of the text everywhere I think I know enough about every aspect of these old sites now to actually make one now.

>>15106 fuarrrk it, I will just have to renew the trial like we did back in the day.

Can't do that in Adobe Photoshop CC

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/web-design-history Infographics like this suck, but this one has some good perspective.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22clipart%22

These are the most exhaustive references on every major force at play on the web at the time that I can find. Sorry if they're a little obvious. >https://archive.org/details/software >https://web.archive.org/web/*/yahoo.com >https://web.archive.org/web/*/geocities.com >https://web.archive.org/web/*/aol.com >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_(decade) >https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history Rough hardware limitations grouped by period: 1990-1994: >Resolution: 640x480 16 color >Internet access: dial up (40kbps) 1994-1998: >Resolution: 800x600 256 color >Internet access: broadband (128kbps) 1998-2002: >Resolution: 800x600 16 bit color >Internet access: broadband (200kbps) 2002-2006: >Resolution: 1024x728 or higher, 24 bit color >Internet access: wireless (350kbps)

Don't forget to put everything on a single page you have to scroll down, with a web ring link and a huge visitor counter at the bottom. Animated gifs, and embedded midis. And generally that web 3.1 a e s t h e t i c that later came to be known as "seapunk", you know, pyramids, palm trees, dolphins, floating chrome spheres.

>>15123 It's funny how the aesthetic stuff is just a charicature of this whole period and sometimes barely resembles it but somehow it still evokes nostalgia.

Just messing around, threw together a quick homepage using Windows 98 plus paint shop pro and a clipart disc.

>>15130 Needs a sparkly space background.

I'm convinced that "anim8or" was used to create tons of the 3D graphics found on the early web. >It was released in 1999, just one year after blender >It was completely free >It was and is much, much easier to use than any other 3D software >It was popular in my hometown in the 3D animation scene It's still up and being maintained, and the features/interface from 1999 are still there! It's very easy to use, like the MS Paint of 3D modeling and animation. Even if I'm wrong, it can definitely be used to create those old graphics.

>>15131

I don't miss the soykafty graphic designs but god would it be nice to browse the net without infinite scroll, tracking and bloat again.

>>15142 optional (!) infinite scroll would be okay... but tracking and unnecessary junk is really pissing me off >>15130 nice! >>15140 that sounds interesting, i'll try to find out if i can still find it on the interwebz >>15112 fair enough... :D i mean, i just find it funny that younglings are finding out about the old internet TM :D but i am grateful you started this thread... we should start a lainchan webring

There where multiple common web styles in the 90s. 1) The academic/engineer/technical style. This style still exists and was largely created on Unix workstations. Most Unix workstations ran at the resolution of 1152x900 and many of these sites consisted of simple text orientated content with a handful of high-res images of typically graphs, diagrams, and screenshots. They also commonly served PS papers, essays, manuals etc. When a web-browser meant Mosaic, most webpages where of this style, With the introduction of Netscape and more formatting options in their non-standard HTML extensions led to other common styles. (The Netscape extensions to to HTML is what also led to the "Best viewed with" gifs. The second thing that came into play was the low resolution displays of many PCs that where starting to get onto the net. The traditional websites and there use of high-res images didn't display very well on low res displays. This was made much worse with people using Netscape's formatting extensions which made it very easy to make pages unusable on low res PCs. Thus the addition of "best viewed in x res" Personal web-pages where largely made on Unix workstations, most commonly on University labs, as well as a number of dial-up Unix hosts from PCs. These pages where more often about the owner trying to see what they could pull of with the current version of Netscape. Sites like this are still common, obviously with newer stuff. The rise of GeoCities, and other normal person centered web hosting services. These pages where mostly made by copying and pasting the HTML from the techie pages and plastering with tonnes of clip-art from a $10 clip-art CD. When IE came out, along with frames there was a bit of a war on which browser was glitzier. With FrontPage being released people that couldn't figure out HTML 3 no-longer had to copy and paste their HTML from techie play sites.

>>15143 That is pretty funny. And yeah, we should totally start a webring! I was also thinking about sending little badges with awards to the best sites like they used to do as well.

>>15140 Some of these animations probably go back a lot further than I was expecting: http://rtr.hackedbygod.net/intro.html I did not know the Amiga could be used to make these graphics.

Since the thread subject mentioned the 2000s, I want to talk a bit about a different style that doesn't seem to get brought up much. I kind of liked the "Web 1.5" aesthetic from the early/mid 00s, where social-networking and content-sharing sites had become a thing where most people hung out, but you still had many smaller websites and especially forums floating around. By that point we dropped the tacky gifs and logos made with stock special effects, and we moved on to gradients. Lots of gradients. Especially in user interfaces such as on forums and even non-web stuff like window managers. Blackbox and its descendants are a prime example. Hell, they even had variants that ran on Windows such as bbLean, which I used to replace XP's default environment with something better (and rice my desktop like a cool kid). I myself had a fascination with these little 80x15 "antipixel" buttons people would make for plugging their websites and such. Pic is what I'm talking about. I would post the one I made for my little (abject failure of a) forum when I was 14, but I can't find it anywhere despite having a folder full of icons I made for the board itself.

>>15161 your post made me think of mid 2000s forum signatures, another forgotten area of internet folk art. it's almost time for an ironic revival of this aesthetic... better break out your best photoshop brushes and free fonts from dafont.com.

Ah, the age of the dancing babies and flying toasters, Clippy and Jeeves. Back when everyone made little banners so people could link to their site. And there was so much butthurt over leeching bandwidth when linking an image was the only way to post it, remember that? Here's a couple of my favourite retro-sites. http://www.asiacarrera.com/ Asia Carrera is the only porn star in Mensa. She was a self-taught webmaster back when that was pretty rare. http://ulab.jdkweb.net/index.html This site is deliberately low-tech, not only because Superman, the old boy who runs the place is a geek of a respectable vintage, but he deliberately keeps the whole site as monolithic as possible, as a part of his design philosophy of maximising compatibility and robustness.

I saw today that Valve has changed its site to a sterile, soulless version.

>>16057 looks like absolute soykaf tbqh

Of course this one https://fauux.neocities.org

>>15252 >Asia Carrera is the only porn star in Mensa. She was a self-taught webmaster back when that was pretty rare. IIRC she said she entered the adult film industry because she was a "nerd" and did not want to get made fun of for the women in STEM meme, because she grew up learning about computers and technology instead of doing what most girls her age did.

I use Gifcities for GIFs also my 90s inspired website: alienozioa.wixsite.com/electronics >I need to get my own domain :(

Guys, we're forgetting about a certain website here... http://dustindiamond.com This site was made by the same guy who created YTMND!!! It may look like a simple parody website, but it actually hold what could be one of the most important pieces of internet history. tl;dr: the real Dustin Diamond saw this website, got pissed, attempted to sue Max for creating the site, Dustin lost the case, making this one of the first instances of free speech winning over a celebrity, and marking the foundations of what can be done on the internet. Also, gotta love the "sign my guestbook" part. It really helps in letting you know when this website was made! Unfortunately, the guestbook no longer works.

>>15250 forum signatures still exist on myanimelist and gaiaonline

I was recently thinking about this. If I ever need a personal website I want it to have a retro design, but probably without the wacky tiling backgrounds and such. I wanted to give templeos.org as an example but the domain seems to be expired. RIP terry Here is the archive link though: https://web.archive.org/web/20190307005513/https://www.templeos.org/

>>16221 It's the current maintainer that let the domain expire by accident, should be up soon again. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/TempleOS_Official/comments/b1wr2w/templeos_down/

>>16222 Ah that's nice to know. I was about to bid some money to get it if went out of hold to rehost it or something.

im stuck using a terminal based web browser on tty2 because my fan is broken and i cant be doing that soykaf on school with the equivalent of an ibm fan from 1979

fuarrrk thIs is so CLUNKY. i forgot to mention that soykafty website designs are better than this, especially for school

If he internet became a pool of intranets again will oldschool pages come back?

Here's the landing page for my domain. Since I don't host any website I decided to make this one just for the sake of doing it.

http://www.grsites.com/archive/textures/

>>16353 Amazing. Thank you for linking this.

>>16165 Bruh, it's on her Web site. She did it to rebel against her parents.

Ok, who here is the owner of this one: https://fauux.neocities.org/ ? Very nice!

>>15106 >Unfortunately Virtualbox does not work well with Windows 98 at all, even with heavy configuration, but I'm sure you cal all get a copy of VMware easily. How about KVM + qemu? qemu will emulate the i440fx chipset, which is what you can expect to see inside a proper Windows 98 system.

I made my 3D gifs using Bryce. It was available as shareware for PC and Mac, and inevitably ended up with that late 90s look, due to the materials catalog, and also exporting the result in 256 colors. The 8-bit limit ultimately defined the look, and demanded careful palette choice and dithering. Many of the graphics pre-dated the first graphical browser (1993), and were created on Amiga because I already them on compilation floppies. Amiga software: Deluxe paint 3: Bitmap graphics with 4096 colors Imagine 2: Traditional 4-panel layout 3D modelling Vista Pro: Fractal landscapes Claymation: Parametric modelling and animation. Ridiculously ahead of its time https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-049

>>16475 Not really. She ran away from her abusive, violent parents, then turned tricks to eat. After she did the math, she went to stripping, and then to porn. She realised she could retire early if she did her own accounting and didn't have any drug habits.

>>16721 That's some great insight from someone who was there, thank you very much. >>16687 I can try that. The 98 VM is pretty much done, the only thing wrong with it is a couple of pieces of software that can no longer be registered and have to be manually reinstalled when the free trial expires. A lot of research still to do if I ever make the other versions, except XP which is easy to research as it's older, plus I used it.

Oh boy, those were the golden days of the World Wide Web. No much JavaScript or CSS to rely on since browsers wouldn't follow the standards, just HTML tables to keep things in place and frames for saving bandwidth. Nowadays websites are horrendous abominations with dozens JavaScript origins being called by one single page, things breaking if you don't accept third party cookies, videos automatically playing as you browse, audio playing and you don't even know form which tab it's coming from and everything taking much more resources than they should from our computers. Websites nowadays are invasive clusterfucks not only from a privacy standpoint. Funnily enough, I am a web developer.

>>16721 Wanna re-live that feel of getting a new XXX Format mag (ST user here)... Future publishing currently publish: Linux Format Its very similar to the old Amiga/ST format... but a soykaf ton more expensive (£6.49) it still comes with DVD on the cover tho! The content is quit good and most people here would like it - but don't expect the articles to require a super saiyan power level... But you get that same feel (for 10 min) you might have got back in the day when you get a new edition and dive inside to find what awaits you this month! N.B. second pic is some of my work from back on the ST (neochrome master)... Check my 512 colour pallet (thats 8 shades of gray)! - and i even programmed this image as a horizontal scroller - being of a resolution so high that it would require 2 monitors to view its full majesty!

>>16890 First pic...

If instagram was made in the 2000s

I prefer the 2005s era internet. 90s era designs were too autistic even for me.

>>16348 >le vaporwave Not aesthetic or reminiscent of the late 90s-early 00s sorry

>>17122 Just wait a few more years and people will be making html5 coded flash movies

>>17124 that doesn't sound like such a bad future honestly

>>15117 >Can't do that in Adobe Photoshop CC Is that a joke?

>>17136 More to the point I don't think even deluxe paint 4 could do that kind of rotational distortion. You would have to program it yourself demo coder style... Hard work! I would go one step further and say that image was created with chipshop! But it could maybe done with Corel draw or gimp... But I doubt it was created in an 8 bit environment!

>>15122 >Resolution: 640x480 16 color 256 color was pretty much standard by the 90s, and I can't think of any widely used home computers with that high a resolution but only 16 colors that were popular into the 90s, save the pc-98, and even then that was more or less completely japan exclusive

>>17122 This. As someone who grew up less in the geocites era and moreso in the age of newgrounds, most 90s websites feel like a bunch of empty clutter.

>>18087 Might be an unfair example, but try viewing almost any modern news website without an adblocker. My fuarrrking god

>>18088 Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I like the way things are. I fuarrrking hate modern social media, although I feel like my rational for doing so is different from that of most people here. I'm just saying 90s websites are very much one of those things you had to have grown up with to like. Most people born after the mid 90s find them to be primitive and ugly.

my page is on neocities. the guy running the service would answer your questions. soykaf.org if you care

>>18100 I thought you hated this place and wanted nothing more to do with it? (Thats not a dig - I'm curious). I've always liked the strange design of your site through, good soykaf.

this isn't really old school since the web died right after this website was made (2007) and there have been no attempts at design since

>>16057 and on top of that of course it's still an absolute bloated piece of buggy soykaf. i wouldn't care what a website looked like if it actually worked (actually i would, because i want the same font and color on every website, since i go on the web to read. not to browse magazines)

herro, i like websites. First it was only a hobby and then made some money with it, but its totally not worth it. people think they get them for free and if not they will do it themselves with website-builders and will pay tons of money of just to prove that. One example: >Client spend 1500 dollar on a website from a different designer or whatever >He basically got scammed for a bootstrap template >He spend nearly his full budget >He realized this but wants a new site >He contacts me over a friend >He expects a site for the price of 1500 with the budget of 200 of his left budget. >His logic is "I spend 1700 in total and i do not pay more" >He got a site which is worth way more then 200 >The only thing he tells is "it doesn't look like soykaf" >He wants more, but for the same price and not 1 dollar more Yeah, i love to be paid less then Indian. If you need any help with your projects just contact me, i love to help.

>>20213 OP here, I am 28 years old, got internet in the late 90s. I remember using AOL, AIM, going through old fansites and personal sites, using GeoCities to create websites, customizing MySpace. Also, zoomers welcome to contribute.

>And there was so much butthurt over leeching bandwidth when linking an image was the only way to post it, remember that? funny how they didn't think to realize the web is a bad design and switch to a content-addressable system right then. meanwhile linking is still broken garbage even today and worse in every way. the only reason the referer [sic] header still exists is to prevent leeching images.

>>20738 You have to be willing to walk away from a potential deal or you'll end up losing, you said so yourself normal people are completley clueless and will undervalue the effort required to make a proper site. I always tell them (politely of course) that the $5000, three month long web project they are offering 200 bucks and a week long timespan isn't worth my time.

>>16663 I saw that website from the Lainzine links earlier and I had to sign up on Neocities to make a thing of my own. Spent the entire day messing around with HTML.

>>21728 >normal people are completely clueless they just play clueless

>>20172 People like to assign a cutoff point but there really isn't one. The old-web didn't really die as much as it did fade out as people decided they valued popularity over creativity. You can still find plenty of genuine examples of sites like that to this day. They won't come up in the top search results, but if you go in a few pages you'll be surprised how much you can find.

>>20738 That looks like a cool site, sadly it's been taken offline. I've got a similar thing going where I trade engineering services for BTC. I've been online for a couple of years and made just enough to maintain the site online and pay for beer but not too long ago I finally scored a relatively big project after denying dozens of unreasonable requests. Web development is indeed saturated with clueless people and is terribly paid, most of the actual income from such projects comes from the administration / hosting, if you're willing to go that far and prove to be reliable I assure you there are people out there willing to pay a fair price for such services. Otherwise I strongly suggest you expand into lower level territory to cover more niche areas that are crammed and pay more. Either way its a competitive environment. neohex.xyz

We really overvalue creativity in the old times, people simply copy whatever is working. Even in neocities you see an awful lot of fauux or tsuki like themes, are they creative? of course not.

>>26719 Hey, that font looks awesome! Care to share?

>>26723 It's the old itch.io font https://neohex.xyz/static/fonts/paragraph.ttf

https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ https://phrack.org https://cultdeadcow.com/ https://www.jwz.org/

sftn.github.io

>>26723 Just to clarify, after posting the site I received an email about the actual origin of the font, its not from itch.io, rather from an early 2000s freeware site that's as relevant to the OP as it gets. It has a bunch of neat, old school fonts. Definitely worth checking it out. http://www.dsg4.com/04/index.shtml

http://site.pi3.com.pl/

http://www.ain23.com/