Web Design in Olden Days
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pre-CSS with rounded corner images.
Yeah, i still remember using tables with backgrounds. Didn't understand one bit of CSS at the time when it first arrived.
When CSS finally hit some browsers, it was like an angel sent from heaven.
I don't know how to tell the youngsters listening how unbelievably brutal it was to make everything in the world out of tables.
Then the hard realization hit, and persisted for a good # of years, that IE was a bastard. CSS is what killed IE and made it the hated enemy of all web developers.
You don't have to tell them. Ask them to design some HTML emails. That fucking world is still alive there, especially if your emails are supposed to work on old machines (mail merges to government/healthcare).
If you hate someone, ask them to do it.
Yeah. It's diabolical. I have no idea why it's that way still.
I’m developing an email builder. I had no idea it’d be this complex.
We were still taught to use tables in high school in 2015. I tried to use CSS and got in trouble
Even to this day if I have to build an HTML table I’m filled with dread
I cannot relate to the tables, but the happiest day of my career was the day we were able to tell the business “Internet Explorer is no longer supported by Microsoft”
Anything round was done with images in those days. Those curved ends are table cells with an image background, the rows above only have to have straight sides and that can stretch as far as necessary. A lot of vertically repeating background images here.
Still easier to center things without a div.
CSS3*
Could be tables or CSS2, but you had to do similar tricks to working with tables to do rounded corners prior to CSS3.
For a 90s website, it really deserves that reward. It looks clean and professional. Most websites during that time have annoying colors, graphics, fonts, etc.
I concur. If people think this is bad, they were not born in 1995.
I mean, I was born in 1991 and I think this is f*** ugly
Kathy Santos, master of tables, the cleardot.gif and totally not designing a home page around an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper.
You could try to avoid designing on 8.5x11 / A4 paper, but your "stakeholders" would bring you back to it eventually...
Hell, they still do this today
Bet she had a wicked geocities page too.
Everything has to appear above the fold
She was also a CLAM insider
Ahh, back when the sky was the limit for creativity. Now, just pick a wordpress template and swap out banners, logos, and colors.
Thanks mobile devices for making web design boring again!
This is why I hate the term ‘mobile first’.
I make a fucking sexy website for desktops then just have stacks of content for phones. Still get clients and clients get customers.
My take on the term is your CSS styles should be mobile first since it’s good practice to have additive styles than subtractive. That’s totally separate from the actual way it was designed though. A designer can design desktop first and then mobile. The order in which the designer made the thing should have no impact in the order that the CSS is written in.
Most mobile sites suck too, so I just go back to desktop view for many of them and use zoom a ton.
People use many sites more on mobile than desktop so it makes sense to optimize it for those. And start from there. Your creativity isn’t limited IMO, you can do whatever you want as long it’s accessible and content makes sense
I wonder what your websites will look like in 26 years time? OMG remember when we used websites!
RemindMe! 26 years
I will be messaging you in 26 years on 2050-06-15 05:23:17 UTC to remind you of this link
6 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
I think desktops are here to stay. Resolutions might get crazy, but we've already started down that road and solved for it to some degree by declaring that "px" no longer means "pixel" when phones started having UHD/retina screens.
A lot of devices with no screen at all
Pours a 40 for all the forgotten BBSs...
I don’t think they’ll be in 3D but using depth somehow sounds plausible. And a lot of devices without any screen.
640x480 layout with tables. I bet the entire page was 16kb too.
I remember the first time I loaded up a WordPress site "designed for Retina" and the home page was 16MB of slide show photos
I only recently started preserving images at "retina" resolutions for desktop in the last few years. 10-15 years ago when retina optimization was first a thing, it seemed cool for mobile phones, but I couldn't imagine making people download desktop-size images at retina resolutions.
ResSwap image swappers for different screens. Ugh!
Using complete srcsets is a ton of additional work that I just don't consider valuable for most websites unless it's a large organization with a big budget, a personal project of yours, or explicitly some kind of photography website.
It was at least easier in the early days where via media queries, you'd just set either non-retina images where px exactly matches pixel size, or "retina" where it was a 4-pixel grid per px.
Not many people remember this, but when we loaded websites in the 1990s, the requests were mailed in with a self-addressed stamped envelope, and in less than a week you would get a print out like the one above.
Once the sites moved onto the internet, the rest is history.
Looks better than most crap I see these days.
Is that tiny, unkerned, pixeled-ass Trebuchet MS I see? Classic.
That's actually a really good looking website for '98
Yea, because I remember many looking like a hot mess of overwhelming color, various font types and sizes, and all sorts of chaotically placed images.
I remember when randomly adding a radius to a background was the pinnacle of web design.
Until you had to figure out how to get text to sit inside the curve…. Then you gave up and made it square again.
Meaning, Kathy Santos is no quitter!
New life goal: get a commemorative plaque for building a website haha.
This is honestly a super professional and well made website for 1998, takes me back
YOU GO, KATHY SANTOS!
clam.com is now being sold by domain squatters for 1 million lol. Comes with a free logo too so that's a steal
Back when <table> was a top notch feature
Lots of “slices” in this design!
We BUSINESS deliver CONTINUITY
We business deliver continuity.
That's at least 2 tables!
Required more skill than now, that's for sure.
Dreamweaver and tables!
Olden days
I could gopher something a bit more 'olden'
Probably shouldn't go to clam.com on your work computer.
Love it! I haven’t been doing it quite as long as this (started in 2000), but I definitely had some beauties like this (that I printed and painstakingly laid out in my big portfolio case to bring to job interviews). Lol
Olden days 😂
Im surprised by all the old heads in this post!
Nowadays we get to pick from whatever out of 5 billion frameworks to choose from. It sure was a simpler time back then.
Designed for 640x480 methinks. Think she used web-safe colors?
"I have 25 years experience"
I once won an award for a series of 3 animated gif-banners for British Airways
Tablezzzz
To be fair, designing and implementing that in 1998 is actually quite impressive. I'm sure the tables behind it are an ungodly mess, though
That website looks like it was generated with some NetObjects Fusion!
I had a very similar template for a personal site when I was experimenting in getting away from table management!
This is the most FrontPage thing I've ever seen, haha.