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Under Construction (2015)

codersnotes.com

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Re: Under Construction (2015)

#3
I got dizzy when looking at the bottom of the page where the space (stars etc..) background is used. I'm quite glad sites aren't made like that anymore. I also love to be reminded of the following:

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

Re: Under Construction (2015)

#6
I started offering hosted guestbooks as a Perl CGI script, backed by a homegrown pipe-delimited text file database, in the 1990s. I moved them over to PHP and MySQL in 2002. 11,000 of those guestbooks are still linked from live websites, and about 600 have had people add new entries in the past year. I added reCAPTCHA a few years ago to keep the spam to a minimum, otherwise they look essentially the same as they did in the 1990s, with a variety of neon fonts on custom tiled background images. I plan to keep hosting them forever.

Re: Under Construction (2015)

#7
I was just thinking about these the other day. The other thing that died off was "web rings". From back in the days when search engines were rubbish, so you'd have to find one site that was approximately what you were after, then click lots of links until eventually, at about 4 or 5 degrees of separation from the original search, you might find what you were originally looking for. I know, it seems barbaric now.

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.

Re: Under Construction (2015)

#8
This page should be the first site on the History of the WWW Webring.

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

Re: Under Construction (2015)

#9
From the article:

> 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.

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