When was the pinnacle of web design?

Yotsubaaa said:
Yeah! Remember back when everyone and their dog had a Geocities (or Angelfire) web page?
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It truly was a simpler, better time. (:_(
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God I miss these old websites. They were gaudy and tacky but you know there was effort and personality put into them. Nowadays it’s all corporate, smartphone-oriented minimalism that somehow makes your computer run slower than these old websites with hundreds of graphics on them.

BTW there's this ED page filled with old Geocities gifs if anyone wants to take a trip down memory lane:
encyclopediadramatica.se

Geoshities - Encyclopedia Dramatica

encyclopediadramatica.se encyclopediadramatica.se
 
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BingBong said:
The Gradient/Comic Sans Era
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Geocities with Papyrus-fonted LinkExchange banners. We need to go back.

Answer said:
God I miss these old websites. They were gaudy and tacky but you know there was effort and personality put into them. Nowadays it’s all corporate, smartphone-oriented minimalism that somehow makes your computer run slower than these old websites with hundreds of graphics on them.

BTW there's this ED page filled with old Geocities gifs if anyone wants to take a trip down memory lane:
encyclopediadramatica.se

Geoshities - Encyclopedia Dramatica

encyclopediadramatica.se encyclopediadramatica.se
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I can see now that I am very stupid and wrong.
 
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Answer said:
Nowadays it’s all corporate, smartphone-oriented minimalism that somehow makes your computer run slower than these old websites with hundreds of graphics on them.
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Yeah, I'm wondering about that. Is the reason websites are so much slower nowadays because Javascript is that much slower than Java and Flash were, or because people just write way shittier code now that they can get away with it?
 
The Prof. Dr. style used by some of the world's smartest people, including several Nobel Prize winners, is the pinnacle of web design.

profdr.png

Prof. Dr. Style

It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.
contemporary-home-computing.org
 
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I don't know if there was ever particularly a pinnacle of web design, considering how lots of early 2000s websites were full of Flash elements that were mandated, and ran like absolute shit on any computer. God help you if you were running a resolution like 1024x768 or better.

Ironically, computers of today could run all those trashy Flash animations no problem, but they're all gone now.

Plain HTML pages are the best. They load quickly and run on anything. They even remained more elegant on smartphones than all the dreck designed around touchscreens.
 
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I would say mid 2015, uBlock Origin came out and has has enough time to mature, if you have the right filters, it was the silver bullet. I don't remember seeing any ads, everything loaded near-instantly over the DOCSIS connection I had at that time, I could open a good few dozen tabs and not suffer. Google actually gave relevant results. And let's not forget the "who-needs-whitespace" concept people used.
 
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I think the peak was probably mid-late 2000s. Right at the advent of phones. Loved the feel of LiveJournal and Blogger pages at the time. Things were very customizable but interfaces weren't as clunky as they were just a few years prior. Old Geocities/Angelfire pages are also peak though. I hate this scalable/mobile-friendly shit. A lot of website themes and designs suck shit and are less flexible than ever if you're not some dedicated web design autist with good taste.
 
Core1036 said:
I would say mid 2015, uBlock Origin came out and has has enough time to mature, if you have the right filters, it was the silver bullet. I don't remember seeing any ads, everything loaded near-instantly over the DOCSIS connection I had at that time, I could open a good few dozen tabs and not suffer. Google actually gave relevant results. And let's not forget the "who-needs-whitespace" concept people used.
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You didn't see any ads because you were running uBlock. But without uBlock/Noscript/Adblock and so on pretty much every website is horrendous. Most users here are giving answers based on how the web looked for them when running all sorts of browser addons to defeat advertisements and flash and javascript nonsense. For the average user the internet has always been a minefield of scams and advertisements and popups and they are not experiences nor sophisticated or technical enough to deal with their browsers to clean up their own internet browsing. Essentially allowing these predatory companies to take advantage of them.

But needing to filter the internet has been a thing since the early 90s. The 90s features endless email spam and bots posting Usenet groups and other forums or communities. Protecting your email inbox from spam was almost impossible. By the time those were starting to get dealt with there were new threats of banner ads, pop ups, pop overs, flashing animations, and even some embedded audio ads. By the 2000s pretty much all search engines were filled with advertisements. And most websites were serving advertisements. Not to mention all of the viruses.

Now we are in this dystopian nightmare of javascript and advertisements dominating the web. Where trying to sanitize your web browser from advertisements is some type of tech arms race against Google and Microsoft and other companies. Where they are actively working against advertising blockers and script blockers. And forcing advertisements on users or else deliberately ruining functionality of their sites.

I can't remember being as frustrated over user experience with browsers as I am now.
 
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XYZpdq said:
Ah, the menu bar in the left frame. So functional, so perfect.
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Came here to say this; your websites Table of Contents or whatever in a nice little area, so you could jump whenever you wanted. Also, anyone before all the interactive, pop-up, banner, and other shit that gets in the way or makes navigating/scrolling a pain in the ass.
 
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Baklava said:
I think the peak was probably mid-late 2000s. Right at the advent of phones. Loved the feel of LiveJournal and Blogger pages at the time. Things were very customizable but interfaces weren't as clunky as they were just a few years prior. Old Geocities/Angelfire pages are also peak though. I hate this scalable/mobile-friendly shit. A lot of website themes and designs suck shit and are less flexible than ever if you're not some dedicated web design autist with good taste.
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Yeah that’s something that’s a bit upsetting. Is that whenever you design a webpage you can’t just think about a computer user where you could do really cool stuff with multiple views, and shifting sliding animations because of phone fags.

Phones really we’re the web dev equivalent of introducing crack cocaine to black community is in the 80s.
 
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