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Aside from the Cowboy Bebop nostalgia hit, this site is a great example of how clear, creative, and fun sites were in the late 1990s. While I struggle to identi

Aside from the Cowboy Bebop nostalgia hit, this site is a great example of how clear, creative, and fun sites were in the late 1990s. While I struggle to identify the many reasons why I think sites looked better back then, I think being simple and content focused are two of them.

esrauch 4y ago
Sites mostly didn't look this good though, they were even more garish colors and 'under construction' banners
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  Guilty as charged. Also don’t forget about frames, marquee text, and that smoking skeleton wearing sunglasses gif. :)
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Frames were quite useful at times, though, particularly for sites that acted as a directory of other sites. With how slow dialup could be it was sometimes nice to have the list of sites you might want to visit in a compact list frame to the left so you didn’t have to hit back 5 times to get back to the directory or juggle multiple windows (because tabs didn’t yet exist).
  - frob 4y ago
    Frames were a great way to keep around nav before the sticky css attribute. However, they were horrible for linking.
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    Frames were the OG SPA
- JasserInicide 4y ago
  This is a great example of classic graphics design (at least I'm guessing she probably had some training in it) being directly translated to the web. It's just an image made entirely in Photoshop and the space for the links are carved there. Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s. Nowadays you'd be wild to start with PS for designing a website.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I kinda miss the dead simple near-pixel-perfection and freedom of font choice that could be achieved with tables-and-images web design. If you were smart with choice of color, image format, etc you could even make them load fast on slow connections despite the large number of images involved. Their source code was awful to look at but it’s not like modern web design doesn’t come with its own dump truck full of trade-offs.
  - mikeryan 4y ago
    * Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s* It lasted longer than that. Sketch wasn’t launched until 2010 and it probably took a good five years (at least) for people to switch to that
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Most sites were designed for 640x480 displays too so you really had to keep things concise to fit on the first screen/page.
api 4y ago
Lack of ads, lack of SEO.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Sites from the late 90s had ads and SEO. Some pretty terrible ads like flashing banners, popups, and later Flash. In fact Flash bad reputation wasn't because the tech was bad, far from it, but because of how it was used, particularly in ads. Popup blockers were the ad blockers of the time, and the situation with popups was so bad that popup blocking became a standard feature of most browsers. As for SEO, it was crude, like the search engines of the time, but it was there, keyword stuffing, link farms, etc... Some sites from the 90s, like the one linked here were ad-free, SEO-free and usable on a browser that is not Internet Explorer, but far from all of them were. I still like their simplicity, especially now that we have modern hardware and broadband connectivity, I don't miss the 56k modems that were part of late 90s experience.
  - pkaeding 4y ago
    SEO from that era involved putting a bunch of "keywords" in the same color text as the background at the bottom of the page. Good times...
RamblingCTO 4y ago
I don't feel like this site is simple, it's noisy and crowded. It doesn't aid me in finding what's provided to me. Although it looks very cool I'm quite glad we simplified designs and put UX on top of the priority list vs showing off what we can do.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xwdv 4y ago
  Why does it have to aid you in finding anything? We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days. Let’s be honest, when you came to this site you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Instead the site invites you to simply look around, embrace the excitement of clicking randomly and not really knowing what you’re going to get, and not really caring either. Just be a thoughtless child, wandering a garden yanking leaves along the way. Now isn’t that rejuvenating?
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    "Whatever happens, happens."
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    As much as I want to agree with you, we're not kids anymore. When I need to find a store's operating hours so I can try to dash over after work and before dinner, I don't have time for the Scavenger Hunt in the Garden of Narnia Experience.
  - RamblingCTO 4y ago
    > We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days. I consider the internet something like a library. I want to find relevant stuff, not sift through shit to get to something interesting. I didn't even know what it had because I was overwhelmed with colors and unusual styles that I clicked around and left. Sure, it's a nice reminder of the old days and some people find it pretty, but it's bad at conveying information imho.
- 4y ago
nerdchum 4y ago
They looked original.
hgs3 4y ago
These days you only see creative interfaces in video games.
josephd79 4y ago
Winamp skins!
zwaps 4y ago
To be fair, for 1999, this is an all around fantastic site.
- Forge36 4y ago
  It was updated for the Netflix series. So it's still maintained
  - tm2t 4y ago
    I think he's talking about the look of the site. If so, it hasn't changed much (apart from the content) since 1999 AFAIK.
  - VectorLock 4y ago
    Consistent updates for 24 years. Makes me feel bad I never stuck with anything that long in my life.
    - bookofjoe 4y ago
      My website started in 2004 and after 18+ years the only thing that's changed is the images are larger.
  - neffo 4y ago
    And she's not even watched all of the anime yet.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      I honestly liked it more than the anime. /me ducks
  - ape4 4y ago
    The html is in lowercase so that slightly helps to calculate a date. (Older websites were all uppercase)
    - 4y ago
the_snooze 4y ago
>I think being simple and content focused are two of them. You mean you don't like newsletter subscription pop-ups? Or a virtual assistant chat window on the corner? Or auto-playing videos that follow you when you scroll down? Or a choice between "Accept all cookies" and "Learn more?"
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  You can close the auto-playing video by simply waiting 10 seconds for the “x close” button to appear, which is 5px high and 12px wide.
  - mhfu 4y ago
    "which is 5px high and 12px wide" And that is just the visible part, actual clickable area is 1px by 1px so even when you correctly click on the "x", you don't actually close it.
    - procarch2019 4y ago
      Reddit mobile site does this when you tap a post. It drives me nuts. Then you have to hit back, which refreshes Reddit and brings you back to the top. I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app.
      - xattt 4y ago
        > I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app. This might also be a dark pattern to exploit attention spans compromised by chronic content consumption. A user sees new content at the top of the page, forgets the content they wanted to see, sticks around to look at novel material. THEN the user either goes back and gets distracted again, or at the very least, goes back to their intended page. Also to note, Reddit disabled i.reddit.com (the old mobile site that was snappy) within the last month. I wouldn’t be surprised if old.reddit.com was next on the chopping block.
krelian 4y ago
I've been thinking about this too. Why is it about these sites that they transmit that changes how we approach and experience them. The internet of the 90's had a sort magical feeling to it. It was new and different and felt very personal. In essence it wasn't yet devoured by capitalism. It felt honest and real.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  It eschews convention. Convention had yet to be established in the 90s; anything was fair game. I suspect we are going to run into the same burnout with AI, and much quicker. Today, "holy shit anything is possible with this magic." Tomorrow, it's going to be as exciting as your average HR drone.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Responsive websites pretty much killed this type of aesthetic. It would be an absolute nightmare to get this sort of design to work well while supporting mobile. It's a real pity, because the hybrid designs we get now all looks like a bunch of uninspired rectangles.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  This site works fine on mobile
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Kinda doesn't though. Mobile most of all needs concessions for the much more limited input precision.
      - scotty79 4y ago
        Personally I prefer pinch zoom for input precision instead of overly mobile design.
    - cantaloa 4y ago
      You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in. Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).
      - kbelder 4y ago
        You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish. The problem will fix itself.
birdyrooster 4y ago
It’s because so many websites have become generalized to become a platform to gain as large an audience as possible but that audience is splintering and decentralizing and there is nothing they will be able to do to draw them back to the gray zone
omoikane 4y ago
Part of it might be because everyone did their own thing back then. There weren't many frameworks or templates, and your content weren't delivered on top of massive social networks that enforced consistency, so individual websites looked unique and refreshing. You might say that old websites were more artisanal while modern websites are more mass produced.
mfext 4y ago
For me, what was great back then were splash pages. The more creative your splash page, the better. It was l33t if someone centered their site, like one would center their splash page. This site does that.
stubybubs 4y ago
Sorry, but there's no webring membership on this site. The webmaster clearly does not deserve their title. 0/10

esrauch 4y ago

Sites mostly didn't look this good though, they were even more garish colors and 'under construction' banners

Bluecobra 4y ago
Guilty as charged. Also don’t forget about frames, marquee text, and that smoking skeleton wearing sunglasses gif. :)
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Frames were quite useful at times, though, particularly for sites that acted as a directory of other sites. With how slow dialup could be it was sometimes nice to have the list of sites you might want to visit in a compact list frame to the left so you didn’t have to hit back 5 times to get back to the directory or juggle multiple windows (because tabs didn’t yet exist).
- frob 4y ago
  Frames were a great way to keep around nav before the sticky css attribute. However, they were horrible for linking.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  Frames were the OG SPA
JasserInicide 4y ago
This is a great example of classic graphics design (at least I'm guessing she probably had some training in it) being directly translated to the web. It's just an image made entirely in Photoshop and the space for the links are carved there. Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s. Nowadays you'd be wild to start with PS for designing a website.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I kinda miss the dead simple near-pixel-perfection and freedom of font choice that could be achieved with tables-and-images web design. If you were smart with choice of color, image format, etc you could even make them load fast on slow connections despite the large number of images involved. Their source code was awful to look at but it’s not like modern web design doesn’t come with its own dump truck full of trade-offs.
- mikeryan 4y ago
  * Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s* It lasted longer than that. Sketch wasn’t launched until 2010 and it probably took a good five years (at least) for people to switch to that

qbasic_forever 4y ago

Most sites were designed for 640x480 displays too so you really had to keep things concise to fit on the first screen/page.

api 4y ago

Lack of ads, lack of SEO.

GuB-42 4y ago
Sites from the late 90s had ads and SEO. Some pretty terrible ads like flashing banners, popups, and later Flash. In fact Flash bad reputation wasn't because the tech was bad, far from it, but because of how it was used, particularly in ads. Popup blockers were the ad blockers of the time, and the situation with popups was so bad that popup blocking became a standard feature of most browsers. As for SEO, it was crude, like the search engines of the time, but it was there, keyword stuffing, link farms, etc... Some sites from the 90s, like the one linked here were ad-free, SEO-free and usable on a browser that is not Internet Explorer, but far from all of them were. I still like their simplicity, especially now that we have modern hardware and broadband connectivity, I don't miss the 56k modems that were part of late 90s experience.
- pkaeding 4y ago
  SEO from that era involved putting a bunch of "keywords" in the same color text as the background at the bottom of the page. Good times...

RamblingCTO 4y ago

I don't feel like this site is simple, it's noisy and crowded. It doesn't aid me in finding what's provided to me. Although it looks very cool I'm quite glad we simplified designs and put UX on top of the priority list vs showing off what we can do.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xwdv 4y ago
Why does it have to aid you in finding anything? We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days. Let’s be honest, when you came to this site you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Instead the site invites you to simply look around, embrace the excitement of clicking randomly and not really knowing what you’re going to get, and not really caring either. Just be a thoughtless child, wandering a garden yanking leaves along the way. Now isn’t that rejuvenating?
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  "Whatever happens, happens."
- jstarfish 4y ago
  As much as I want to agree with you, we're not kids anymore. When I need to find a store's operating hours so I can try to dash over after work and before dinner, I don't have time for the Scavenger Hunt in the Garden of Narnia Experience.
- RamblingCTO 4y ago
  > We’re so obsessed with efficiency and “productivity” these days. I consider the internet something like a library. I want to find relevant stuff, not sift through shit to get to something interesting. I didn't even know what it had because I was overwhelmed with colors and unusual styles that I clicked around and left. Sure, it's a nice reminder of the old days and some people find it pretty, but it's bad at conveying information imho.
4y ago

nerdchum 4y ago

They looked original.

hgs3 4y ago

These days you only see creative interfaces in video games.

josephd79 4y ago

Winamp skins!

zwaps 4y ago

To be fair, for 1999, this is an all around fantastic site.

Forge36 4y ago
It was updated for the Netflix series. So it's still maintained
- tm2t 4y ago
  I think he's talking about the look of the site. If so, it hasn't changed much (apart from the content) since 1999 AFAIK.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Consistent updates for 24 years. Makes me feel bad I never stuck with anything that long in my life.
  - bookofjoe 4y ago
    My website started in 2004 and after 18+ years the only thing that's changed is the images are larger.
- neffo 4y ago
  And she's not even watched all of the anime yet.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I honestly liked it more than the anime. /me ducks
- ape4 4y ago
  The html is in lowercase so that slightly helps to calculate a date. (Older websites were all uppercase)
  - 4y ago

the_snooze 4y ago

>I think being simple and content focused are two of them. You mean you don't like newsletter subscription pop-ups? Or a virtual assistant chat window on the corner? Or auto-playing videos that follow you when you scroll down? Or a choice between "Accept all cookies" and "Learn more?"

unsupp0rted 4y ago
You can close the auto-playing video by simply waiting 10 seconds for the “x close” button to appear, which is 5px high and 12px wide.
- mhfu 4y ago
  "which is 5px high and 12px wide" And that is just the visible part, actual clickable area is 1px by 1px so even when you correctly click on the "x", you don't actually close it.
  - procarch2019 4y ago
    Reddit mobile site does this when you tap a post. It drives me nuts. Then you have to hit back, which refreshes Reddit and brings you back to the top. I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app.
    - xattt 4y ago
      > I think it’s intentionally designed to get people to switch to the app. This might also be a dark pattern to exploit attention spans compromised by chronic content consumption. A user sees new content at the top of the page, forgets the content they wanted to see, sticks around to look at novel material. THEN the user either goes back and gets distracted again, or at the very least, goes back to their intended page. Also to note, Reddit disabled i.reddit.com (the old mobile site that was snappy) within the last month. I wouldn’t be surprised if old.reddit.com was next on the chopping block.

krelian 4y ago

I've been thinking about this too. Why is it about these sites that they transmit that changes how we approach and experience them. The internet of the 90's had a sort magical feeling to it. It was new and different and felt very personal. In essence it wasn't yet devoured by capitalism. It felt honest and real.

jstarfish 4y ago
It eschews convention. Convention had yet to be established in the 90s; anything was fair game. I suspect we are going to run into the same burnout with AI, and much quicker. Today, "holy shit anything is possible with this magic." Tomorrow, it's going to be as exciting as your average HR drone.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Responsive websites pretty much killed this type of aesthetic. It would be an absolute nightmare to get this sort of design to work well while supporting mobile. It's a real pity, because the hybrid designs we get now all looks like a bunch of uninspired rectangles.

moron4hire 4y ago
This site works fine on mobile
- scotty79 4y ago
  Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Kinda doesn't though. Mobile most of all needs concessions for the much more limited input precision.
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Personally I prefer pinch zoom for input precision instead of overly mobile design.
  - cantaloa 4y ago
    You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in. Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).
    - kbelder 4y ago
      You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish. The problem will fix itself.

birdyrooster 4y ago

It’s because so many websites have become generalized to become a platform to gain as large an audience as possible but that audience is splintering and decentralizing and there is nothing they will be able to do to draw them back to the gray zone

omoikane 4y ago

Part of it might be because everyone did their own thing back then. There weren't many frameworks or templates, and your content weren't delivered on top of massive social networks that enforced consistency, so individual websites looked unique and refreshing. You might say that old websites were more artisanal while modern websites are more mass produced.

mfext 4y ago

For me, what was great back then were splash pages. The more creative your splash page, the better. It was l33t if someone centered their site, like one would center their splash page. This site does that.

stubybubs 4y ago

Sorry, but there's no webring membership on this site. The webmaster clearly does not deserve their title. 0/10