When you go ahead and decide to make a tribute page to a website that’s barely been gone for five years, you do question, ever so slightly, whether the nostalgia should actually be setting in yet. Clearly, that’s been one of my many afterthoughts of creating the Clippersports.com look-back, but the more I think about it, the more I wanted not to just remember that web site, but also the building process itself. I look back those five years, and even five more, when I first started posting web content in some fashion, and just think about how different web design and creation has become. It’s enough to make you feel old even at the ripe age of one score and four.

So, now that I’ve already got my old page’s content history marked down, here’s my small attempt at looking at these website design histories that have mostly come and gone. (At least touching the major ones that I had concerned myself with at the time…)

• Frames – Loading two (or more) pages into a browser window at once?! Get outta town! Complete with adjustable separators and possibly some extra scroll bars? Sign me up.
  Frames were such a great tool at the time for making menus and static headers, but these are probably some of the most offensive things, and it was only a matter of time before they became history.




• Submitting to Yahoo!’s Directory – Volumes and volumes could be spent talking about the ways that search engine technology has affected the history of web site development. I would say that the best example of them all was that human cataloging of websites on Yahoo! was, for a time, the fundamental way to be found. You would have to go into their directory (which I was shocked to find still exists in much the same fashion, all tucked away at http://dir.yahoo.com), determine which category your site most belonged in, and submit a request to be included. My attempts never worked out for the best, but it might have been something I did wrong.




• Accessing audio/video from download – Back in the day, everything was a download. For one thing, you wouldn’t want to load anything into a page unless it was completely necessary because Internet connections were so slow. Now, you’ll see Flash scripts (like those use at YouTube) to display your movie or sound clip, where the only actual download necessary is the Flash plugin for your browser. Of course, now a days there is also the huge revenue that advertising brings to websites, and who wouldn’t want to force the viewer to come back to your site each time they want to see your content.




• Meaningful differentiation by having a personal domain that wasn’t free – Not too long into the age when web browsers could first be found on commercial shelves, a man named David Bohnett first came up with the idea that everybody should be able to have their own website and that it should be achieved with no cost to them. This idea was launched as Geocities, and before long there really became a large number of people creating their own websites under subdomains of Geocities, and later places like Tripod and Angelfire. The popularity of these sites was so great that it really gave instant credibility to anybody on the web who actually took out a domain name of there own, instead of using what was free. Now, in the days post-Go Daddy Super Bowl commercials, the differentiation of having your own name has worn off some. Of course, there is the whole discussion that today’s incarnation of free page hosting has taking the form of profile pages and blogging communities, I’ll hope to get to more on this subject in another posting.

Hope you enjoyed the list.