Back in the day it was just a table based layout though. It was used for quite some time. I'd say the design first emerged about 1998 and lasted until the smar

Back in the day it was just a table based layout though. It was used for quite some time. I'd say the design first emerged about 1998 and lasted until the smartphones came in 2010 or so. It's surprisingly easy to make that sort of design if you use the right tools. You just drew it in photoshop and sliced it up and exported it as an HTML table, then you poked out the bits where the content was supposed to go. Doing it with CSS is a right pain in the ass though. I guess that's why there are so many mono-colored rectangles in modern web design.