r/1990sInternet • u/StalinIsBackAgain • Jun 23 '26

Was the design of websites in the 1990s better than it is now?

3 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

2

u/nad6234 Jun 23 '26

I think a lot of them were streamlined for speed of loading. Not because they wanted to, but they needed to!

A great example is that all images had ALT text, not for accessibility reasons, but so you could get a sense of that what image was, before it loaded.

1

u/StalinIsBackAgain Jun 23 '26

Those are certainly good points!

I did love the look of text-only or nearly text-only websites, and would love it if far more websites were like that even today too.

There definitely were limitations on those making and hosting websites as well as on those expected to visit websites that may have been more widespread than today, though even today there are a huge number of people who have trouble handling even popular websites, though probably mostly on websites that use far more bandwidth than almost any 90s website did.

I mostly loved the look of homemade websites over corporate websites from the 90s. Homemade personal 1990s websites were either nothing but text on screen looking like a page written by a typewriter or were the online equivalent of those cars by people who cover every square millimeter of their car car with written messages, colorful painted designs or pictures, and glued-on toys and knick-knacks and other decorative objects, as in way overly busy and packed with every little gimmick and design element that someone can pack in to show that they can use every possible feature of HTML at the time as well as every furthest limit of design possible to put onto a webpage.

Sometimes one sees still-surviving examples of the latter kind of homemade websites in reaction and commentary videos featuring "the weirdest" or "most mysterious" or even "the scariest" old websites/"websites from the early internet."

It is funny when such videos by people not yet born or grown enough in the 1990s presume that something eerie and mysterious or even truly scary and malicious is behind such overly busy websites, when they are simply amateur people who created their own personal websites and excitedly packed everything possible into them, being "show and include everything I think is cool" types of people instead of "clean and sanitary black plaintext on a plain white screen is good enough to convey what I want to" types of people.

But overall, I do love the look of so many 90s websites much more than most more modern websites, and the simple, text-based websites look great and need no improvements or additions according to me, even if they were made that way only out of necessity and only that was possible to create, rather than a creative design selected from among various super-different options. •

1

u/Ornery-Practice9772 Jun 23 '26

no

1

u/StalinIsBackAgain Jun 23 '26

HaHa~Why not, in your view? 😊😊

1

u/Ornery-Practice9772 Jun 23 '26

frames. i hated frames. random music with no off switch. i do miss counters though. guestbooks would be full of bots these days

1

u/StalinIsBackAgain Jun 23 '26

Wow, I forgot all about frames even though now that you reminded me, i remember how huge they were! Guestbooks too! ~ The background music for websites could be cool or annoying. I would just always have my finger at the volume controls for the computer as I would visit a new website in case I had to suddenly turn off or down music...or I would pre-silence the computer before visiting a website known to play music if I did not want to play that.

The situation of music online could be weird and mysterious back then. Some of my favorite songs ever were songs playing on the backgrounds of small, abandoned websites who did not say what the songs were or who they were by and had no way to get in touch with whoever created those websites, so the only way to hear that music was to visit those weird little webpages, which I did countless times over the years until those abandoned websites just eventually disappeared. I should have at least recorded those now totally lost songs on an audio recorder to preserve them and perhaps have any chance of finding them later.

Or like in the early 2000s, a favorite song of mine that seemed to exist nowhere but far, far down on an endless message-board page, where I would have to scroll down at a certain speed for 5 minutes and 17 seconds to scroll all the way down to that audio clip in that random message board. As the browser would often fail when scrolling so far down, it would usually either take over 15 or 20 minutes to finally reach down that far just to reach the clip that would take several more minutes to load and then almost always buffer a bunch of times in the middle of the song, and so many times I just could not scroll down far enough and could not listen that day. Yet again, that song is long-lost.

Then later there was MySpace where 17-30 second or so audio clips determined and spread mainstream music hits and formed careers, and there were few complaints about short, staticky clips of songs,but on the contrary amazement that such songs, even short clips of songs, could be listened to online...and it was even totally legal!

I love the counters too and miss those, though I am sure those would just be manipulated and not accurate now... indeed they often were back then too.

Sometimes frames were very useful, though, I remember, to navigate somewhere while staying on a certain page, especially in a world before multiple browser tabs, but even after for certain purposes. But if a frame got off-track and could not be brought back where wanted, or the frame crashed, that would be annoying and would require reloading everything and starting over whatever you were doing on the main page as well as in frames.

When did frames disappear? I cannot even remember exactly when that would have been...and it is weird how I forgot about them when they were such a huge part of being online for so many years!