Under Construction (2015)

Reciprocal links between similar sites were much more important in those days. In fact, the web was generally a friendlier, less commercialised and siloed place, because cooperation between webmasters was the only way anyone would ever find your content.

What I find sad is that now Google is becoming more commercial and heavily gamed through SEO, the first page of results is increasingly likely to be full of links to buy a thing than information about that thing. And because there is much looser interlinking between sites now, it's a lot harder to find information any other way.

Have we _really_ moved forward?

In 20 years time, will today's parallax-scrolling, advert-laden, click-bait sites look any less ridiculous?

Rotating skulls have not gone away..they have just changed appearance!

Consider what it does to this HN discussion about Under Construction) http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=...

1. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/guestboo...

> But the horrible truth is that this really was how these websites were. They all looked like this, every little one of the fuckers.

Well, no. Many websites did not bother to include all that stuff. But these didn't bother to do a lot of styling at all. Original browser style. Very ugly, but at least informative and not nearly as distracting as the sites described in the article.

And used pixel fonts to get the font size down to a readable 10px to squeeze in text navigation where icons didn't cut the mustard.

Having said that the default grey background was there for a reason - it was a sane readable default. I find many modern sites still difficult on the eyes compared to their unstyled counterparts.

The lack of an underline and visited colour change on links disorientates me. It's all mystery meat navigation.

Mystery meat navigation is a whole other section of history missing. Some websites were made entirely in flash. Others just had a splash page. And many of these flash sites required you to hover and click about like a lunatic trying to find web content.

Oh the good old days...

> Which side won? Like any good mutually-assured destruction, we all lost.

This is true on so many levels.

Reminds me of the homepages I used to design with frames and image maps, wierdly-tiled backgrounds, and tons of <FONT> tags of course. Good times were had by all.

Oh boy, did I love frames.

That, and fixed backgrounds

> (while writing this article, I discovered that if you Google for the phrase "blink tag", you get... well...)

You should definitely do this.

"Moving items attract the visitors' eye. This is a well-established UX principle."

Always fun to look and see which of the 226 different ways to get Mew a Pokemon site would post, or which of the equally large number of ways to get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time you'd see on a Zelda site.

Topsites were another big thing there too. Bit like webrings, except clicking on the button would vote the site you're on up the rankings and make it more likely to appear on others. These fell apart about as quickly as webrings did, especially when people gamed the hell out of them.

There was also:

Awkward Javascript animated objects moving around with the mouse cursor. Those were pretty big at one point.

The inevitable blink tags, which got so annoying that browsers dropped all support for them.

Jokey 'I agree to proceed to this site' splash pages, where the other link would send you to Google. Or perhaps something like the Barbie website.

Sites hotlinking to images and resources on other sites. Which then made a comeback for a while on Myspace, and still remains a large issue on internet forums. Bonus points if the original webmaster got so annoyed with the bandwidth costs, he replaced the image link with a porn picture instead.

Various awkward ways to try and 'block' right clicking, as if this could 'protect' the content from thieves.

Songs or sound effects playing in the background, which usually gave you quite a shock if you speakers were up and you moved to another site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0

Various extremely basic HTML tutorials that basically said how to add bold text, italic text, underlined text, images and links.

Javascript used for 'password protection' (in the slightly later days). You can probably guess why this wasn't the best idea in the world.

Oh, and fanlistings. Where you had a big old list of people who liked something (a series, a game, a celebrity, a band, etc), and you could send an email with a name and contact address to be added to it.

It was certainly a different era then, though a surprising amount of stuff common then is actually still around. For example, this site still seems to offer webrings:

http://www.webringworld.org/

And sites like Bravenet still offer everything that was popular in 1996 or so.