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Dr. Quinn official website from 1998, still online
- yuppie_scum 5y agoMy mom loved this show.
- alleycat5000 5y agoI watched with my mom, along with Touched By An Angel.
- pkorzeniewski 5y agoI don't know how many of you watched this show back in the day or even remember it, but the website has been created around 1998 and it's still online in its original form! Similar case as the old-school Space Jam website, a blast from the past :-)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- don-code 5y agoWhat's interesting to me is that, in spite of the site having been online since 1998, the site has been updated long after that - on the same platform. There are new box sets from 2009 for sale, for instance. My naive assumption is that the site works well enough, and overhauling it or moving it to another platform (even a common one, that wouldn't require as much individual upkeep) just isn't worth it. I had a professor in college with a website like this, where it was updated each year with new course material, but still used the same Netscape Composer-generated layout from the late 90s: http://meseec.ce.rit.edu/ http://meseec.ce.rit.edu/ The course material was still relevant and being updated - more things are changing than just the year. It works well enough, and I assume he has better things to do than revamp his website.
- colechristensen 5y agoI have boots that were made to a design which hasn’t changed in 90 years, 50 year old books (but really book design goes back way longer)... lots of things which haven’t changed in decades, some centuries. Why should the interchange of information have to change in style as often as the clothing of fashion aficionados? Old styles have the benefit of being done in a time where you just couldn’t do as much so the purpose of exchanging information got more focus. Fashion is something to be aware of and wary of... looking like it was designed recently is a good way to attract people, but it’s also a good way to attract people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
- rapind 5y agoOK I’m not a fan of the ad riddled sites these days, but I think we remember a different 90s if you’re saying we were more focused on function than flare back then.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoHow many evolutions did the state of the art for bookbinding and typesetting go through before we ended up with the modern book? UX and screen design are relatively new fields. I'm certain we'll eventually reach an equilibrium, based off a few decades of learnings and experience.
- hulitu 5y ago> Why should the interchange of information have to change in style as often as the clothing of fashion aficionados? Because of Material Design, Rust or because of the management. Using the brain is hard so they choose the path of least resistance. > Old styles have the benefit of being done in a time where you just couldn’t do as much so the purpose of exchanging information got more focus. Yes, but, but, but now we have RAM and disk space and processor power. Why not use it ? > Fashion is something to be aware of and wary of... looking like it was designed recently is a good way to attract people, but it’s also a good way to attract people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance. The problem is that _only_ attracts people only interested in surface appeal instead of substance.
- blakesterz 5y agoSomehow the Dole/Kemp site from 96 is still going: http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm Someone must have a decent list, some kinda of "Awesome 90s" list on GitHub or something?
- bombcar 5y agoOriginally Paid for by Dole Kemp '96 Campaign Committee Original Web Design by Presage Internet Campaigns To Learn more about Bob Dole, Please Visit the Dole Institute This Web Site is Presented for Educational Purposes by 4President.org
- sen 5y agoSeeing that motion-blurred animated GIF banner at the bottom gave me an intense nostalgia rush, I made a good living making those banners for a year or 2 back in the late 90s. $50-150 per banner ($25/frame), doing a few each evening, with a month or 2 backlog in the queue. It was a fun and easily-profitable era if you knew even the basics of web/graphics.
- 101008 5y agoThat motion-blurred animate GIF also remind me of some videogames from that era. Anyone with more knowledge can explain why that style was used in the late 90s? Was it about low resolution and small palettes?
- dwighttk 5y agoBandwidth and storage were more constrained.
- harrylepotter 5y agoMy take- Photoshop was relatively novel at the time, and motion blur was one of the earliest filters. Do this at varying levels for a few frames and you’ve got yourself an eye-catching animated gif with minimal effort.
- sen 5y ago
- jancsika 5y agoOMG why is that button blurry? If I were a kid today I'd wonder why old people ever bothered watching television or browsing the internet at all. At the same time, I probably wouldn't even notice that famous Beatles recordings were recorded in mono.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoDoing graphic design on a janky 17" CRT at 1024x768 resolution wasn't the best experience. In '98 it was still pretty early days for the web and web design was a bit of a wild west (much like the TV show) where any random person with an email address, website, and copy of Photoshop could sell their design services. Even big companies didn't have dedicated digital marketing or design divisions yet. The quality of what you got varied a lot.
- kbenson 5y agoat 858 bytes, even if you were able to connect at a full 56k connection on your modem (many people could only get some lower fraction, like 33.6 or 28.8 because of line noise), it would still take almost an eigth of a second to download the button if your connection did nothing but that. Designing for the web in the 90's and early 2000's was so much more a matter of picking the right trade-offs to make. Shitty trade-offs like "should I make this button worse to shave off 100 bytes? By itself it won't matter, but if I do it to all the butons and icons, that first page load might be a whole second or two faster..."
- dspillett 5y agoIn '98 not many would even have 56K - unless adoption was much quicker elsewhere than here (UK). The first units didn't hit the market until '97, and were not cheap, and the V90 standard followed in early '98. Also it was rare to see more than 48K in my experience, 40K on many lines. Memories of reconnecting and forcing a 36k6 symmetric attempt (anything standard above had upstream at half the rate if down) rather than getting 48 down & 24 up, or less, because I had things to upload and needed the upstream "speed"!
- 5y ago
- Fwirt 5y agoAnother in the "still online since the '90s" list is of course the original "Space Jam" promotional website. When the new movie started being promoted they reused the domain, but obviously somebody at WB cares about internet history because they left a link to the original on the front page and moved it to a subdirectory. https://www.spacejam.com/1996/ https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
- crazysim 5y agoThey definitely did. They even updated the 1996 page over the years with the latest and greatest in internet analytic tracking.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoInteresting combination of analytics on that page. Accessed via https://www.spacejam.com/1996 https://www.spacejam.com/1996, the landing page contains a Google Analytics 4 tag. GA4 was released in late 2020. Strangely, the GA tag is absent if you navigate to the (otherwise identical) landing page on https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.htm https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.htm. There's also an old Omniture tag, with a copyright notice from 2008. Omniture was acquired by Adobe around that time, and was renamed to Adobe Analytics almost a decade ago. The other pages have Google Tag Manager (first released 2012) installed. However the container fails to load, as either the account or container has since been deleted. I'm slightly surprised there's no old Urchin tags floating around, then the site would be a kind of museum of web analytics services.
- perardi 5y ago1. Ah, “web ring” links. Now there is some nostalgia. I mean, I was more about the DBZ than the DrQ, but still, memories. 2. 159.8 KB, if I’m reading the inspector in Safari correctly. Nostalgia of a different sort.
- stonecharioteer 5y ago:D Did you make a geocities DBZ website by stealing photos off dragonballz.com too?
- quercusa 5y agoAnd apparently not suffering under the HN load!
- alfalfasprout 5y agoI miss seeing really responsive and performant websites. I feel like browsing the web nowadays no matter what I end up downloading huge tracking bundles and running a ton of javascript.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoThis website may be performant, but it's also fixed-width, and thus not the other kind of responsive. Almost unusable on my device.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoWhen I was learning website design in the early oughts we were taught to make them 'liquid' to work on different width screens. So it was possible then, and without MBs of JS and CSS. Though there were fewer tools to do so. Tables became pseudo grid mode. I think I still prefer the simplicity of that era.
- dwighttk 5y agoWhat device? Works fine on Safari iOS with the double tap to zoom.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoOn my phone. The line lengths are too long, so zooming in to get a reasonable font size means scrolling back and forth for each line. And clicking links is a shot in the dark.
- dwighttk 5y agoHuh. The only slight irritation I notice is the scrolling isn’t soft-locked to just up and down so when I scroll it does a bit of horizontal drift.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
- khazhoux 5y agoRadiohead's "OK Computer" was recorded in Jane Seymour's mansion. You didn't need to know that, but now you do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Catherine%27s_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Catherine%27s_Court
- zeeshanqureshi 5y agoThis predates everything I know http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- sumanthvepa 5y agoAnd still looks pretty modern. Plain. But modern.
- atum47 5y agoKiller layout. Love it.
- peanut_worm 5y agoDr. Quinn is getting railed by their hosting provider
- danschumann 5y agoBest website
- jack_jennings 5y agoIncredibly, the link at the bottom to the web developer's website still works as well.
- aedanman 5y agoVery tempted to add 'background-size: cover' to the developers site background but may take away from the 90s authenticity.
- stolenmerch 5y agoAside from not working well on devices that didn't yet exist when this was built, I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons why I don't like this design. I'm sure there are accessibility issues and other things that would be addressed now, but as for layout I still like it.
- rossdavidh 5y agoI would not be at all surprised if, accessibility-wise, it worked at least as well as most modern websites, perhaps better.
- rambojazz 5y agoIt saddens me that the Guestbook ain't working.
- MikusR 5y agoWhile not as old, but https://24hoursofhappy.com/ https://24hoursofhappy.com/ is still up.
- rfrey 5y agoDisappointed that the forum link doesn't work -- I had my post all composed in my head!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rossdavidh 5y agoLoaded quickly. Easy to navigate around. Responsive. Intuitive to the point of what is there even to figure out.
- duxup 5y agoNot sure I'd call that "responsive". It's not responsive for me that I can tell.
- pseudalopex 5y agoResponsive means different things in common English and web jargon.
- temp8964 5y agoDoes not pop out all the questions for user approval! Imaging how many law suits they will get!
- supergirl 5y agodon’t need to if they are not tracking
- noja 5y agoI like that this is old, but old doesn't mean full of security holes.
- Killakwinn 5y agoOk so that’s why I couldn’t buy the domain