haha I still have "creating killer websites" in my bookshelf. It was a quick buy, never thought of it to become a classic. Nevertheless - it was such an experience to see websites designed the way the book shows. But, not practical INHO. In my eyes, it was just a replication of print media. If one remembers how coldfusion worked at that time, or, dreamweaver -> some things are clearly borrowed from quark express (DTP…
Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web) with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB. Perhaps they were the top designers for prin…
> Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated.
People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.