It’s 1997 and you want to build a website

I started learning HTML in 1995 and first wrote it professionally in 1997. (I was sixteen and got to design a mid-size software company's intranet on my first summer job in the business. It was easy to get into the industry then with any modest web skills.)

This article is missing two important ways to learn HTML back in the day:

1) Read the source. Websites were simple. There was no JavaScript or CSS. Everything was right there in one file. If you saw a site you liked, just take a copy of the source and tweak it locally to understand how it works.

2) GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.

Here's a live example of a 1995 website: http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n1/

Look at the source. It's easy to understand the basics of HTML just by comparing the source and output. Deeply nested divs and tables were not a thing yet.

I think that was the year my internet career started. It began when one evening I was hanging out in an internet cafe. At some point, someone said "Oh there comes the guy who owns the company that provides us with internet access". I was so excited that I jumped at that guy and started bombarding him with questions. About how this whole magic internet thing works. My enthusiasm seemed to be contagious and after a while he said "You know what, I'll give you an ssh account on our server. Then you can build your own website on our server under /~mg.

I was mesmerized. I knew absolutely nothing about ssh, http, html etc. But I knew I had to spend the night figuring it out. And have a website up and running the next morning.

So I ran home and started reading and trying things out. As I couldn't really see much use in all that html gibberish, I just used full size images for every page and interlinked them via the <map> element. Hurray! Next morning my website was online! Mostly built by just using Photoshop :)

I have not thought about the <map> element for decades now. But it seems it is still supported! That's what I love about HTML.

Biggest hurdle was purchasing a PC.

Back in 1995, we paid equivalent of almost $4000 for a PC with 133 MHz Pentium processor - don't remember the RAM or HDD, but it came with Windows 95. Since we lived somewhat rural back then, libraries were woefully outdated on the computer/IT department - both as far as books and actual PCs go.

The one bookstore we had, didn't really carry much of those things either. Most of my learning came through various PC magazine tutorials, and ordering books via said magazines. Or more realistically - trying to find out what other people worked or dabbled with IT in my little town, and trying to learn through them. Everything was very, very DIY and bootstrapped.

And just for the sake of nostalgia - one of the local PC-enthusiasts had parents that worked at the municipality, and managed to argue that we (the local PC "community") needed a space of our own. So we got this run-down part of an older school building, rent-free, for maybe 7 years.

As long as we paid the utility for that part, and any internet connection, we could pretty much do as pleased. You had probably a dozen or so guys pretty much living there, playing various game over LAN. Doom, Quake, Age of empires, and what not.

Another part of guys were mostly tinkering with websites, software, or what not. Still vividly remember all the Borland boxes laying around. And of course, the more free spirited guys "Buy what? No, let me show you our warez".

But you know what - we made money, real and good money, from just churning out websites. There were really no beauty standards, little (to no) functionality, and hosting was usually done via some local dude that run a bunch of servers out of his shop.

I dug a website out of an old archive last week. I needed it as a documentary maker has been in touch and some of their questions are answered by just looking at this website from the mid-late 1990s.

It still works. All I used at the time were server side includes and a bit of PERL that was in a /cgi-bin/ . Sure there are some dead links (to some real media files hosted by a third party long-since defunkt) but mostly it just works as SSI is still supported in most web servers and fastCGI exists.

I'm installing it on a laptop tomorrow morning to show the documentary maker. Interestingly they were interviewing me about one thing, but the site shows another thing... that we were one of the first music acts to allow the full download of an album online. This was in early 1998 when we put the entire catalogue online as media files to listen to (first as Real Audio files, later as mp3s, before also embracing Napster and even making live concerts available for free via that).

It's good stuff, early web sites were fun and exciting.

The best feature of this website which was for a record label, is that the bands didn't know what to do with a website so instead I gave control to fans... the whole site was user-generated content as far back as 1996. Things like guitar tabs, lyrics, mishearings, stories, fan artwork... the official record label site was made by fans and just became an archive of everything that the fans and label together cared about. In 1996 this was a link on every page "email if you want to add your content"... it worked.

You find a free (or dirt cheap) CGI-BIN web hoster and FTP your programs there. Files for your message board or site counter are saved in the /CGI-BIN/ directory too. You upload new files to run arbitrary commands and use those commands to walk around the system that you otherwise have no access to. You discover another customer on the same shared host who is selling real estate in Alabama. You consider it strange that all the users have the same group ID, and so can access each other's files. Later on you learn about suEXEC and get some cash to help somebody configure their web server. Two decades later you're doing basically the same job and wonder why it feels so much more difficult now.

Probably closer to 1999 but my first foray into web programming was Neopets. You could upload some HTML for your virtual pet and they'd host it for you. Spent ages making fancy animated text gifs from random tutorials only to realize that my friends couldn't see images that I had hotlinked to "C:\My Documents\awesome.gif". That brought me on a quest to find external hosting which led me to Spaceports.com and then IRC, mIRC scripting and then PHP... and now it's my livelihood. I just wanted to thank Neopets for giving kids the chance to program something and a non-scammy place to host it. I imagine I'm not the only one whose career was kickstarted by a virtual pet.

I remember using this site primarily to learn about HTML: https://web.archive.org/web/19990224220115/http://www.htmlgo...

Extremely popular and helpful in Germany was selfHTML, which started to document the web in 1995: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfhtml

I also used Netscape's HTML tool, played around with HotMetalPro. Here is a link that somewhat is a reference to 1997: https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/html_en/kap_2/backbon...

Some time in 1994 I had a part time job at the local university helping them figure out how to make use of Gopher and WWW. I wrote a 40ish page booklet on HTML, the university printed them and placed boxes of the booklets in the lobby of half a dozen of the main buildings so people could just grab them. And I think about half the student body did.

A couple of weeks later I was hitching a ride with someone and we started talking about what we do. He said that "I'm teaching people this new thing called HTML". Then he reached back into the back seat and pulled out a booklet. He had a whole box of them. Apparently he had just taken a whole box of them from the university and was using this as his course material.

I never told him I wrote it. Actually, I was a bit proud that someone could make a living using teaching materials I'd written and I didn't want to embarrass him. (And since the university had printed boxes of them it wasn't like there was any shortage. My main mission was to get people to use WWW so I didn't mind).

I'd probably cringe if I read it today :-).

(However the thing I'm most proud of from that period was to ensure that policies on student access to publishing materials on their homepages without needing to get the content explicitly approved were adopted across norwegian universities. There was a meeting between the universities to figure out what policies to adopt. I didn't have any real authority, but I managed to convince everyone that what students put on their homepages is none of our business as long as they don't break the law or hurt themselves or someone else.

During that period I also learned that one of the most efficient ways to kill bad policies is to follow them to the letter and generate so much work for other people they need to rethink the policies. :-))

I made a lot of money from nothing back in the day, buying cheap servers from Softlayer and the like (physicals, virtual wasn't a thing) on a monthly rental, purchasing cPanel licenses and selling shared hosting services. Primarily to Americans, the polar opposite of my time zone.

The big money maker was having Frontpage Extensions enabled on the web server - anyone serious wanted it, and few people provided it. I also wrote my own (awful PHP3 based) payment integrations, allowing automated billing. Quite often, the business ran itself.

I really liked using Corel Photo Paint for some early projects in the late '90s. Back when it felt like a black background and 3D textured buttons was a nearly cinematic experience. (Image maps in general were so easy to work with, and I still wonder if they couldn't have been adapted to the modern web with a bit more sensitivity or nostalgia)

Ten years later I reluctantly taught my Photoshop and Illustrator students how to use the built-in web export tools and was legitimately shocked by what they created. They totally got alt text and titles and things, too.

So, lesson learned; now there are some projects for which I really lean into the $app's built-in web export tools. Usually fast, easy, and appropriate to the project, rather than whatever happens when the output is compared against the entire web...

Was around then that I got started.

Static sites, created using Frontpage Express (later, full fat Frontpage, then later again Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Fireworks). Blink, Marquee etc tags being used etc. Got to have a visitor counter and guest book too.

I remember creating sites for various things, hosted on a whole load of different places over the years (.tk brought back memories). I also remember figuring out that I had to upload images and why my image links wouldn't work.

Fun times.

I learned HTML by looking at other people's code. It's a wonder thatvthis feature is still standard in most browsers.

That also made me a firm believer in open-source.

Step 1: go to a Warez site and look for dreamweaver

In 1997, at the age of 13, having access to Microsoft Frontpage Express was pure magic. Wish I still had those first creations.

I built my first one in 1995, so yeah, it was very much teach-yourself, but the good news was that, back then, view-source would give you everything you needed to know about how any given page worked, so you could learn a LOT by finding sites you liked and figuring out how they worked.

By 1997, I was working in a consultancy doing custom sites and early Internet-style applications, which was back then insanely lucrative. Like, we pitched $moviecompany a web site for $1,000,000, and got the deal (it involved DB integration and more active behavior, etc, all of which was novel at the time).

I remember sites used to incorporate a lot of on-theme graphics in fun (also inaccessible) ways. It sounds backwards because of limited connection speeds, but it was pretty common to have titles and navigation buttons and borders and bullet points all presented as GIFs. Back then corporate websites tried hard to look small and personal ( https://web.archive.org/web/19961022174605/http://www.cocaco... under the about page: "management wanted a place in the domain, so we decided to let them have this part" ), while today it seems everyone wants their website to look clean and professional with big splashy images ( https://www.coca-cola.com/ ). That style of unified content and presentation is gone, it's visually out of date, more effort to implement, and hard to do it the right way and have it work well for everyone. But man it looked cool, the web could use a few more cool looking sites.

I taught myself HTML after buying a massively thick book from Barnes and Nobles and used only Netscape Navigator 4.01, which came with something called the Netscape Composer HTML editor.

I'd just finished art school and needed to put together a portfolio website. I thought I was so clever... I made the front page contain an illustration of mine dead center on the screen of a very obese man in a jock strap. You had to click his belly to enter the site.

Anyway, that site got me a "Web designer" job at a company in Richardson, Texas, named Micografx. They were a competitor to Adobe at the time and made some pretty cool software including Picture Publisher (a very robust Windows-only photo editor). They had an entire suite of graphical tools. They also made software called Create a Card, where you could create digital postcards on your computer and email them to people.

My first job was to work on a team to convert that software from CD-ROM to 100% online. It was an incredible learning experience and launched my career into the exciting Web design world on the cusp of the dot-com boom.

I partially owe my career to Netscape Navigator 4.01, which was released in 1997.

I really miss that version of the web sometimes.

Pff nothing about dreamweaver. It was (afair) never good, but it was there. There was another tool I forgot the name of, but even this nieche was filled back then.

1997, by then I had helped start two ISPs, one of them used to be a huge BBS. Building a website was not really the problem, tools were up and coming, it seemed like everyone could build a website with a plain text editor, and a lot of people knew HTML.

The biggest challenge (if you did not work at the ISP) was keeping it on 24x7, and registering your DNS. It sure seems like DNS is a lot easier now than before. You had to call NetSol, and there was a multi-step fax-back and forth process to prove who you were to register your DNS. Sometimes it took days. You needed an act of congress to change things afterwards too, and be sure you did not mess up your NS server information. As for keeping it on 24x7, I think our pipes now are better than ever. T1 down? Yes, why yes it is, there is something wrong with the frame relay again. Or someone at the telco changed my dlci. Or the crazy person with the backhoe cut it. Or the router decided to freak for no reason. Or our custom X.25 connector went bad or lost a solder connection.

Good times... :)

I spent countless hours on a website (I believe) was called htmlgoodies.com - all of his posts were in the style of "So You Want a X, Huh?" Boy, I loved this site. All the feels!

If Joe Burns, PhD reads this then THANK YOU! You had a profound impact on the 14-17 year old me.

Wayback Machine link for those interested: https://web.archive.org/web/19970529013015/http://htmlgoodie...

I suppose I was lucky to be a teenager in the mid-90's with access to a computer with dial up internet. Untold hours using the View Source option in the browser and then trying to make my own stuff using Notepad (Windows). Hundreds of lines of black/white HTML snuffing out syntax errors. Trying to make images used bootleg versions of Photoshop. I recall when I started to see Javascript get popular in webpages and just being blown away people could write that stuff on their own.

Time flies.

I still learn to code from books. Something about reading the code, retyping it, looking at it on the page. It gets glued into my mind in a way that I can actually retain and recall it.

You learn NOTHING from copy pasting stackoverflow. I always look and retype or actually figure out what’s happening. Otherwise I won’t be able to solve problems, just put bandaids on them.

It's missing using Dreamweaver or Frontpage

I went to work for a company that built web apps in 1997, we used WebObjects/EnterpriseObjects (NeXT still at the time) which I still remember fondly as being head and shoulders better than anything else people were using at the time. But Javascript was a horror show, I worked on a web app for the USPS that was required to use IE 2 (!) because they had paid for a site license and they damned well were going to use it, even though Netscape was better at the time.

It was fun work in that everything was so new, it was almost an entirely new industry. Today many people claim to know how to do everything (even though that's pretty foolish), but then you were learning on the fly. When I started at the beginning of the personal computer era (80's) it was a similar kind of wild experimentation era.

It is interesting how much things change.

To be perfectly honest, despite some obvious drawbacks, I miss the simplicity of HTML. And I really dislike how much my every step is tracked online ( and how much it slows everything down.. my online bank when allowed to go nuts loads up for full 30 seconds in chromium; naturally it does not help that it does not want to cooperate when it is not allowed to do that ).

I guess I miss the old days.

I put up a website for a lawyer friend in EU zone recently in pure HTML ( so super simple - nothing fancy, but she did not need that much ). I did not hear any complaints, but then I sold it as a privacy consideration ( you can tell your customers you don't do any analytics, you don't pollute their device with random cookies ).

AOL member pages hosted my first site, around this time (maybe a little earlier?). I recall a friend, Patrick, being the person who put the bug in my brain about making my own website. Later I'd find out my aunt did some web work, or at least had a membership in W3C or some related org.

HTML Goodies (and the DHTML/JS sister site, I forget the branding), also mentioned, was a great next step to expand my knowledge.

But initially AOL actually had some good HTML learning resources. All caps for the tags. I opted for black backgrounds and white or blue text ... :) Developed in Notepad initially.

Somewhere I think I still have printed off copies of some of those old resources I printed so I could look at them offline.

I first learned making websites from Philip Greenspun's 1997 book (dead trees back then; available online now[0]). It was already a couple years after the original release (and I was a kid), but it's amazing how much of his opinions or advice (at least, as I remember it) still holds 25 years later: own your personal domain name, dangers of cookie tracking, structured approach to development and maintenance.

He did make some mis-predictions (Linux turned out pretty good in the end), but I will probably re-read it some time soon, and I expect it to have aged well.

[0]: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

Or just use Microsoft Word and Save as HTML. There's also Microsoft Frontpage [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

I worked for an ecommerce startup in 1998/1999 that was founded in 1997. The app was built in Perl with (by 1999) a MySQL backend.

But there were definitely applications for building larger websites, including ColdFusion[1] from Allaire and, infamously, Broadvision[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_ColdFusion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadvision

I'm not sure if I used Edwin by TurboPower Software, or Notepad... but it worked fine building my home page.[1]

It also worked well enough at work... we had a "brochure ware" type page for the first few years. It wasn't until 2000 that someone with Graphics skills took over.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19971013164938/http://www.tsrcom...

I think that was the year I got my first dial-up Internet connection.

I used Frontpage to create my website and learned HTML by viewing the source code. I then used the command line Windows ftp to upload the web site to a 10MB server I got access to for free from the academic network of the primary school. Later I stole a bunch of MIDI-s, animated GIF-s and Javascript code from other websites.

I remember I was pulling my hair out because the images wouldn't transfer correctly. I didn't know I had to switch to binary mode.

When people ask me how I learned web, I'm usually at a loss remembering what path I took. I often say it was some Dreamweaver and osmosis through reading a lot of A List Apart and Smashing Magazine after being introduced to those websites by my friend, but now seeing the cover the books in this article brought up memories of me being preteen in the mid-2000s finding "HTML for the World Wide Web" on my dad's bookshelf and meticulously going through it.

Back up to 1994... We were supposed to be developing for x-windows. WTF... NCSA Mosaic browser... We're on it. Two months later you could query our Sybase database via an HTML form. Another 3 weeks, you could query our Oracle database with a different form. A year or so later you could download a package to do database interfaces. Soon you could buy one.

Soon after, we used to print the entire catalog of registered domain names, just to see what was taken.

O'Reilly's Webmaster in a Nutshell was my bible in 1997, along with the RFCs: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/webmaster-in-a/15659232...

The ORA Nutshell books were a great series for learning many technologies around the turn of the millennium.

Wasn't Dreamweaver a thing back then? People could create web sites without any knowledge.

Also Netscape Navigator had an option to create HTML sites.

> For somebody surfing the web in 1997, a book might feel a bit… 20th century.

Hard disagree on this...

But to the point, back then web pages were simple enough for it to be trivial to learn by viewing the source, especially if you already had experience with code. You didn't even have to be studying or working in CS specifically, BASIC and Logo were taught in many grade schools.

I learned HTML by creating very basic, random stuff in Netscape Composer and then studying the HTML that it was generating.

wasn't that hard, I used paint shop pro and a text editor and also made Java applets to make things "cool" :)

1997 using GeoCities edit HTML function for the first time

1998 launching the first European website of a major worldwide photography company as a projectmanager, webdesigner, contentwriter, fotographer, "developer" one man team.

was paid 120 Schilling per hour (about 9 EUR).

fun times before the invention of separation of labor on the CyberDataHighway

It's too bad they didn't have Kubernetes and React back then. How did they even survive?

Microsoft Frontpage (released in 1995) is mentioned only in passing. It was frowned upon by people in the know, but i suppose it got the job done for newbies.

One of the biggest changes is that "view source" is no longer helpful to learn HTML from scratch.

my start was in 1994 at university where a sysadmin had offered an extracurricular class to figure out this new http and html thing.

i was among the first in the class to run an http server by my self including cgi and server side includes in perl (setting up a server wasn't part of the class) which earned me a job as assistant sysadmin.

then i got invitet by a classmate to a student club to help them build their website, which i did using spinner/roxen which did serverside includes on steroids by making it look and feel like html itself.

that allowed me to create fancy dynamic websites with generated graphics among other things

I learned html by printing out website source code on a dot matrix printer. I mentioned this in a meeting with a client and half the people were like, “What is a dot matrix printer?”. Good times!

Where’s the “by reading code in ‘view source’ and teaching yourself html”?

In 1997 I’m fairly sure frontpage was out. I believe I used HoTMetaL 5 at that time. They bundle front page is as “use a service” which is odd

Interaction - mainly scripts - were provided by matts script archive.

A book you could have read in 1997, but probably didn't, was Philip Greenspun's "Database Backed Web Sites: The Thinking Person's Guide to Web Publishing".

I learned via the htmlgoodies website, and iirc that was late 1996. Printed pages of things I wanted to remember, and put them in a red binder that I still have to this day.

You load up Frontpage or if its late in 1997, Dreamweaver.

> by 1997, there were other options available

Yup. Download a web site you liked the look of, see how they did it and build your own based on that ;)

Some of us read the W3C specs on HTML and CSS...

Lol does anybody else remember that little cat that would climb all over your open windows and desktop while working?

First site was built with Netscape Composer and hosted on Geocities and then I figured out HTML from tweaking it.

It's 2022 and you want to give a kid a book on how to build a site. Which book might that be?

Didn't you have dreamweaver or frontpage to do that? And Flash if you wanna show off?

<MARQUEE><BLINK>Welcome to 1997!</BLINK></MARQUEE>

AOLserver!

It’s 1997 and you want to build a website...

... just wait a decade or two; it will get much easier.

Seriously, I built a very simply static website around 1997 or 1998 with Adobe Page Mill. It was pretty easy.

I thought this would be about tech but it was basically just you had to read books in 1997 rather than copy paste stack overflow.