221–230 of 427 posts
It lives in all its frameset glory at https://cooltrainer.org/oldbpu/
Compared to today we were underground. The few of us who participated in online forums and groups.
I remember Yahoo groups and thinking about how revolutionary it was to let anyone create their own "space" for other people online.
I also remember some e-friends from the US creating an open source version of it and realizing that anything can be done.
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HN user kyledrake started https://neocities.org/ in 2013 and it is going strong.
Can confirm, going strong. We don't get a ton of media attention (and when we do it's usually stupid and focused on anachronistic design rather than creative control), but we're still growing steadily and getting a lot of really interesting new web sites and traffic.
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Yup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.
I knew a lot of people in school and work places that were using Netscape's built-in WYSIWYG editor, Composer. They couldn't build a site in raw HTML to save their life otherwise, but they could throw something basic together in Composer. Before that, if I'm not mistaken, Navigator 3 had some kind of simple page editor with it as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
A couple of years later, I re"designed" it. Both of them were about as cheesy as you'd expect a preteen's Star Trek fan page to be.
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I recall kids who weren't computer geniuses would still start websites about their hobbies / interests using geocities or tripod. They have wysiwyg editors that were easy. But of course, just having access to computers and the internet wasn't a given for many families
Yup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.
Here's mine: http://users.otenet.gr/~serafeim/old.htm - it's first version was from around 1998 when I was 16 years old so please don't be too judgmental :) It was just a bunch of static html pages that were uploaded through FTP to my internet provider's space. Funny thing - my internet provider still supports publishing home pages so the page remains active for around 20 years (!) with a bunch of revisions: http://u…
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When talking about this, people often like to joke about the webdesign back then. But the personal websites had personality. Facebook profiles feel like government forms to me... "here, fill in this standardized array of fields with your personal data."
I think MySpace ultimately represented the final form of the essentially unlimited customization of the early web. The terribleness of MySpace pages was, I believe, the catalyst that pushed the design trend in the opposite direction, resulting in the "standardized array of fields" as popularized by Facebook. That said, given the cyclical nature of design trends, I strongly suspect that we'll eventually start to see a…
I understand that might change soon, which is a shame.
[1] excepting /r/spackd--ks[2], as it always should be.
[2] post.get_opposite("R.I.P.")