Development XL, Accessible Web Design and Bespoke Development

1998-2001: The Dawn of a new Pillow Emboss

18th February by Mick Horler

1998

Monumental Event: Freeserve launched in September.

Cher fouling up the charts, France winning the World Cup and the moment I acquired a Compuserve floppy from the cover of PC Format. Events that will echo through eternity. People still cared about the ozone layer and Kula Shaker, nobody was lactose intolerant and a decent cordless mouse was a nothing but a madman's dream, these really were the good old days, all except ISP charges. No change out of £20 and faced with local call rate charges, the Internet wasn't exactly filled with Myspacers and Youtoobers, rather it was populated by panicked people desperately downloading content before disconnecting and viewing it offline. Guestbooks using CGI, a spam email every other week, commenting on people's websites via email and being desperately concerned about Hotmail charging for their services; 1998 feels like almost a decade away.

People proudly told the world that they had developed their site using Frontpage Express; users casting a covetous eye over the mouse over effects on the site's navigation. "Frontpage Extensions, you lucky b*****d!". Scrambling around Altavista desperately seeking a free host that included them was always a fruitless experience, if you wanted extensions you had to cough up the big bucks, something I was unwilling to do, at least not in this century.

So, you've acquired your Freeservers 10 megabyte hosting package and you want to build a website. A 400x300 jpeg containing a paragraph of blurry Impact, a free hit-counter and some automatically generated metatags later and it was ready to hit the big-time. Submitted onto UKPlus the masses (35 per day) came hurtling towards my Half-Life site like an Ikea store opening. Look at that hit counter fly!

1999

Monumental Event: Napster launched in July

To quote a songster popular at the time: "Now it's time to party like it's 19.... Hold up it is!", 1999 was a whole lot of fun (with prizes to be won). During this 12 months website designers really started to hone their craft; size 8 verdana was cool, white backgrounds started to catch on, image maps for site navigation were in and I discovered how to reduce the page padding to zero in Frontpage 98. 1999 was also the year in which people began to realise that domain names weren't only for movie stars and FTSE 100 companies, you could get your own! Unfortunately being nothing but a grubby, snotty-nosed schoolboy I was still stuck with a URL the same length as an average Wikipedia article.

1999 was also the year I recall Flash invading our collective retina, and if you thought flash sites were dreadful now then prepare to be surprised; they were worse then. Mystery meat navigation would've been blessed relief, I recall having to track a bouncing ball in order to open a website's navigation requiring the dexterity of a classically trained pianist. People suddenly forgot that using red on blue caused migraine-like symptoms; they were too caught up in making throbbing text banners and using Quake-lifted sound effects to accompany mouse inputs.

2000

Monumental Event: Nupedia, Wikipedia's predecessor, released in March

The millennium bug came and went, I could no longer source Mountain Dew and boo.com died a miserable death. The year 2000 also heralded the start of 'Bevel-mania', and if there was any edge of your website that hadn't been chipped off you were the internet equivalent of a Westboro Baptist church member. Website design was becoming less and less about user interfaces and more about bevels per inch (BPI). Novices used default Photoshop bevel effects along with pillow embosses whilst professionals, myself included, had perfected the art by reducing the bevel size to 1 to create that sharp, web 1.0 cutting edge.

The .com bubble also began its inevitable (wonderful thing, hindsight) descent towards oblivion with the aforementioned boo.com, whilst only selling a couple soon-to-be-soiled 'Fruit of the Loom' t-shirts per month, were somehow valued at more than Debenhams, John Lewis and General Motors combined. boo.com's completed site (which appeared 12 months after the advertising campaign) was, honestly, straight up, even more cliched than the current BBC beta homepage. If below the fold was in vogue back then this would've had 8 folds. It would've been teal, used georgia and had a grungy edge to appeal to the College-kid, Nirvana discovering demographic. Not only cliched, it was also foul to use. If the Soviets had got hold of boo.com during their conflict with the Taleban it would've been used as an intelligence-gathering aid. I miss boo.com like I miss an extended bout of the hiccups, and thankfully my mind has erased any more specific boo-related memories.

ASP had started to make an impression outside of corporate land too, with average savvyed up Joes using it on their own pages more frequently. The first page I recall being ASPified was Digwar.com, the homepage of the much feared Digital Warfare TFC clan. It was also one of the most gloriously attractive, understated pages of 2000 and I still rue the day it finally disappeared from view. Thankfully it's still available on Archive.org so wrap your laughing gear around this!

2001-2004: The 'ITV News has discovered the Internet' Years (working title). Coming soon!