Love Letter to the Early Internet
The “Early Internet” here refers to the late 1990s to the early 2000s, where the Internet was no longer the exclusive domain of technologists, but still mostly limited to enthusiasts. Just about anyone could put together a website on the World Wide Web, but not everyone was into it yet.
Web Design of this period had many iconic characteristics that, for better or worse, give me warm fuzzies.
88x31 & 468x60
If you were webmastering on the early web, you probably know these two dimensions by heart. 88x31 was the standard size for a little button that you would create for others to use to link to your site. It was probably a .gif, because that was the format that could encode animations back then - and if the purpose was to get people to click to go to your site, a little motion went a long way! You’d usually only use a .jpg if you wanted a “high definition” image but in a reasonable filesize for the bandwidths available at the time.
These were often displayed on their own sites accompanied by a <textarea> HTML element with copy/paste-able HTML code for the button, so people could more-easily add it.
Now, it didn’t take long for folks to realize that .gifs also supported transparency so you could give up a little bit of that precious 88x31 real estate to make your button pop - here are couple examples from 2005:
And of course, an updated dogblog button from 2025:
468x60 was the standard size for a banner ad. If you were making something this big and it was actually being shown on other sites, you were hot stuff! These puppies were often animated! It wasn’t likely that someone would take one of these and choose to link back to you with it - in the days of 1024x768 displays, that 468x60 was a big chunk!
Unlike today, where ads squeeze themselves into every shape and size they can, these were kind of the big two form factors for website promotion, and so people would need to make one of each, but usually only these two!
Aesthetic Variation
Different pages looked different. Sites didn’t have to have a single cohesive theme. You’d find something on the homepage, click into a topic-specific section and find an entirely different design: different colors, fonts, and whole layout. This wasn’t just accepted, it was expected. I think the main reason was that sites were “shelves” where people put the various things they wanted to share, versus today a site is often “a brand” that needs to maintain consistent style throughout. I’d like to believe this was because the hearts were purer - or at least it was easier to find a pure heart’s site - but it could also have been symptomatic of hosting being so relatively hard to come by.
If you had one place and one domain and it was expensive and difficult to get another, you’d just put your different stuff in different places on that one site because it was already there!
Brands, advertisers, and marketing hadn’t matured at this point, so there was very little consequence for having “mixed messaging” across a single site. Moreover, search engines hadn’t matured yet, either, so maximizing the variety of content available within a single discovered site was welcome - where else were you going to find something to look at?
Animated GIFs
As you’ve noticed by now, this page has graphics that move! Many of them, each doing their own thing and they didn’t wait for you to press “play!”
The internet from before the late 90s was a much more static place because the technology to create and share animations wasn’t as widespread. Graphics programs were rarer because PCs were less-powerful, and bandwidth was much lower and more-expensive. Even if you did make an awesome animation, your visitors might not be able to pull it down and see it - or they might not appreciate having to! So once people started being able to do it, they were off to the races doing it everywhere! Buttons, decorations, “look at this cool pic I found,” and yes, even banner ads blinked and vied for your attention everywhere… and we (except for the banner ads), generally loved it. The web was coming alive and it felt cool!
Feast your eyes on this bad boy:
Nowadays, “autoplay” whether it be visual or audio, is a big no-no. The major websites - YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc - all have static, unmoving content. Pick your own most-visited site and take a look at it through this lens - it’s dead, isn’t it? Motionless.
Probably ultimately for the better, but there was definitely a sweet spot somewhere in-between “carnival of autoplay” and “dead tree.”
Assuming Return Visitors
Websites would often say things like
The so-and-so page has moved to …
or
Added a bunch of new stuff to the such-and-such page…
or
I’m working on the redesign, should be live soon, check back!
and sometimes even clever little widgets (usually cookie-based) that would actually say “welcome back” if you were recognized as a returning visitor!
All of these could be dismissed nowadays as bloggy phrases, trying to be approachable, but that wasn’t the case in the early web. Everyone actually believed and took for granted that the visitor reading them either has been here before and chose to came back, or that they will come back. Otherwise, being advised of recent or planned changes to the site’s organization wouldn’t be necessary! You’d just say something in the present tense, like “Such-and-such content: here.”
But no! The phraseology all took for granted that visitors would come back! It was cozy to write to your imagined, assumed returning visitors back then, and it’s a cozy memory in retrospect, too.
Backgrounds
<body background="/img/background.gif">
...
Did you know that instead of a white background, or a solid color, you could use a background image? Once this fact was discovered, the enthusiasts went gangbusters, slapping tiled background images on pages everywhere!
You can Browse the Vintage, Early Internet’s galleries to see examples of this, or… see it right here!
Sometimes they were even animated!
Toggle Animated Background… if you dare!
Background Music
If you loved animated GIFs and background images, you’d’ve loved background music! Pass the aux cord, the site you visited is taking control and playing something for you. BGM usually started automatically out of necessity - embeddable player technology hadn’t matured yet so sites couldn’t offer control even if they wanted to!
Nowadays, basically everyone agrees that sites making sound on their own is a nuisance. IMO, much of that is born out of the few dark years when advertisements would autoplay sounds at you. The vintage web was much more polite in its sound design: you got background music to set the mood for the site you were preparing to peruse.
Here are a couple examples from the GeoCities Gallery:
Or, maybe you’d like some BGM of your own…
BUT: Many of these background tracks were MIDI files, a sort-of equivalent of vector graphics - they didn’t contain the sound data, but instructions on how to generate it. You had to have a sound font installed to play them, and depending on the font, they’d sound different! You could run the same MIDI through a piano and an electric guitar font to hear two radically different versions of the same song! In case you need it, here’s what I think is the Windows 98 default sound font: Windows 98 Sound Font / download. Modern browsers seem to still be able to figure MIDI out, though, so the “play” link above will probably work. You might need the sound font if you download the BGM and try to play it on your own machine.
Bravenet Forms
TODO
Censorship Pandas
Adopt-a-Censorship Panda
www.mabsland.com/Adoption.html (archive)
“Adopts” were popular decorations for websites. Someone would make a little character image, and others could post it on their page to “adopt” it. Why? Decorating sites was cool. Sometimes you’d name your adopted creature and make it a character of your own, sometimes not.
The Censorship Pandas were, well, to quote Miss Mab:
As I browsed through the net, I realized that there were a lot of those “adopt a dragon” or “adopt a fuzzy” things were people would draw a picture then have other people ‘adopt’ it to put it on their sites. Kinda a cutesy way of getting visitors. I had a couple once, but over time I took em down. I mean, other than saying “this is what I adopted somewhere on the net”, what point was there to them?
Then an idea hit me.
Everyone is familior with web-ratings. Those are those things on a site that say whether or not they are PG rated or for Mature people only. Course they only come in that black box styles.
So I decided… why not combine the two?
For whatever reason, the Pandas were really popular and you’d see little web-rating pandas peeking at you from the unlikeliest of places. Amazingly, their homepage, first recorded in the Wayback Machine in 2001, is still online mostly unchanged in 2025.
Free Hosting
tripod, lycos, expage, geocities, angelfire, fortunecity
Guestbooks
TODO
Jukeboxes
TODO
Hit Counters
Back in the early days of the Free Hosting, you could upload .html files, usually, and some images, to a directory. Everything else about the web hosting was usually hidden from the webmasters. No access logs, no metrics, no nothing. So how did you know if your site was getting any traffic? The simplest solution was a Hit Counter.
Someone, somewhere, who did have a bit of programming knowledge would whip up a script that would
- increment a count by 1 when viewed
- output image data with the count on it
Every time the page loaded, the counter went up by one - now you could know if people were visiting your site! More sophisticated Hit Counters would attempt to distinguish “Visits” (usually by counting unique IP addresses) from simple page loads, and keep daily and/or weekly tallies. These gave early webmasters a rough general sense of if their site was getting traffic.
Hit counters, as with so many early web accoutrements, were design elements in and of themselves. Lots of services offered a variety of styles and customization options, some even letting you upload your own images and fonts!
Nowadays, proper analytics from server access logs or JavaScript tracking is the norm, and offers much more detailed and accurate insight into visitor behavior than a simple count.
The hit counter above is actually a working example from a site that still offers this service!
WebsiteOut Free Web Counter
www.websiteout.net/counter.php
Interactivity for its Own Sake
TODO
Splash Pages
“Click here to enter”
It used to be popular to have a “splash page” with a little intro to your site, usually a big graphic, and a link to click to enter the main site. As an instance of Aesthetic Variation, these offered a chance to decorate another page with a different style. The form of “big graphic; click here to enter” offered constraints and thereby cultivated creativity.
Some splash pages were just an image with a link and maybe a tiny bit of text, like this one from 2005:
Others added decoration and description all over the page, growing quite tall and busy, like posters on the windows and door of a shop you might choose to enter:
Topsite Lists
TODO
Under Construction
Nothing was ever finished… And since sites expected people would come back, they put up “under construction” badges to let people know that things would be changing, so pardon the mess and do please come back later to see the updates!
I don’t recall ever seeing someone take down an “under construction” badge. If anything, they became a badge of honor, a sign that you were alive and kicking and building!
Every Under Construction gif from the 90s
www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/ (archive)
Nowadays, sites make changes all the time as part of normal operation - not an exceptional event that warrants mention. They’re constantly A/B testing and fixing and improving. There’s no hullabaloo about it, and also no end. In a way, that’s the same as before…
I reckon a difference is that changes to structure are now assumed and unremarkable, and changes to content are something to be ashamed of, almost. Did you change your post after you first published it? Why? What are you hiding? Why were you wrong? Which version does Google have in its index? You’re killing your SEO with those edits!
Anyway, this page is under construction, so please come back later to see the updates!
Webrings
TODO