Back in fifth grade, my class took a field trip to an Amish farm. I remember two things very clearly:
- Our teacher let us chew gum on the trip. Yay!
- We watched a blacksmith work with metal.
The gum was cool, but I was fascinated by the blacksmith. We looked on as he heated a piece of metal, then used tools to shape it. It was like being in a time warp.
It feels like a metaphor to describe the early days of web design. The methods we used in the 1990s and 2000s seem ancient compared to modern times. Technology moves quickly.
I wrote an article about this era over at Speckyboy: Here’s What It Was like to Build a Website in the 90s
However, I wanted to reminisce a bit more about the good old days. So, gather ’round, youngsters. Here are a few tidbits that didn’t make it into the article:
Web Typography Didn’t Exist
OK, web design client. We can use any font you like, so long as it’s Times New Roman, Arial, or Helvetica. Oh, we can’t forget about Verdana!
CSS didn’t yet support custom fonts. Thus, the selections above were all we could safely use. That made it easy to pick a font pairing, though.
Web designers had to rely on system fonts that were installed on the user’s computer. Sure, they may have had Garamond or some other fancy typeface. However, the majority of others likely didn’t. That meant using the most common fonts available.
We had an easy workaround: creating images that contained text. Things like page titles and headings were often graphics. That opened up a world of typographic options. The industry later realized that the practice was terrible for accessibility. Not to mention a pain to change.
I still recall keeping layered PSD files on my machine in case I needed to make edits. All of this trouble so we could fulfill our client’s request for Comic Sans. 😅
Quality Graphics and Photography Were Scarce
Those of you who remember the early web may recall the dearth of quality design assets. For example, my first personal website had all kinds of terrible images. They consisted of sitcom screen captures and animated GIFs. I did my best to keep things classy.
That’s also why the business sites I built back then were mostly text. We didn’t have ready access to photography. The only graphics I had were from a set of Corel clip-art disks. So yeah, the options were limited.
Most of the photos I used were ones I took myself or provided by the client. They were either low-resolution images from digital cameras or scans of printed photographs.
Side note: I spent many hours scanning photos for clients. Some would send a stack of them in the postal mail. That was better than the brave few who sent them over a dial-up internet connection, though. And no, I don’t miss this nightmare for a minute.
Web Browsers Could Drive You Insane 🤯
Building websites that were compatible with available web browsers was perhaps the biggest challenge of all. You’d build a site that looked great in Netscape, only to find it was a broken mess in Internet Explorer.
I think this is exactly what Microsoft intended with IE. They wanted to strong-arm the browser market by supporting proprietary code. Not to mention a lack of support for many standards of the day. The whole anti-trust thing also came into play.
For web designers, this scenario resulted in wasted time squashing bugs. I can’t tell you how many hours it took to get a design looking the same in IE and other browsers. I’m ashamed at how many hacks I used. But hey, you have to do what you can to get by.
As a final fork to the eyeball, Microsoft kept Internet Explorer 6 on the market long after its heyday. A few stingy enterprise clients meant that the browser hung around for about 15 years. In the process, it held an entire industry back.
There Was No Such Thing as Simple Functionality
Much as the blacksmith had to shape their creations by hand, web designers had an old-school process for adding functionality.
These days, we take things like WordPress plugins for granted. Click a few buttons and you have access to forms, photo galleries, or shopping carts. That wasn’t the case back in the day.
I wasn’t (and still am not) smart enough to build software from scratch. There were no AI coding agents to help you get started. Like many web designers, I had to search high and low for a solution. The process took time, and the available software didn’t always work.
Form scripts built in Perl or PHP were easy to find. You had to get lucky for other types of functionality.
For instance, I had a client who wanted to build an online course that included testing. I hit the jackpot by finding a free Perl script called QuizTest. It did exactly what we needed and served us for years. That was more of an exception than the rule, though.
Installing and testing these items was a pain. Each had a different installation and configuration process. They also worked independently of each other. Content management systems were strictly a corporate thing. Thus, you had to piece your site together.
In retrospect, it felt like combining different colors of Play-Doh. It looked cool from the outside, but was always a second away from falling apart. 🫠
Good, Old-Fashioned Websites
It’s hard to believe how far this industry has come in the past 30 years. The pace of development seems accelerated compared to the blacksmith. It took, what, a few centuries for them to be replaced by factories and assembly lines?
Now, we’re in an era where AI is creating even faster change. My daily workflow has changed dramatically in the past two years alone.
That’s one reason why I like to look back to those modest beginnings. It makes me appreciate what I’ve seen and done.
Thanks for reading, kids. My next essay will focus on how cool rotary phones were. 😉