I used Geocities.live to transform the DanQ.me homepage into “Geocities style” and I’ve got to say… I don’t hate what it came up with
Let’s put aside for the moment that you can already send my website back into “90s mode” and dive into this take on how I could present myself in a particularly old-school way. There’s a few things I particularly love:
- It’s actually quite lightweight: ignore all the animated GIFs (which are small anyway) and you’ll see that, compared to my current homepage, there are very few images. I’ve been thinking about going in a direction of less images on the homepage anyway, so it’s interesting to see how it comes together in this unusual context.
- The page sections are solidly distinct: they’re a mishmash of different widths, some of which exhibit a horrendous lack of responsivity, but it’s pretty clear where the “recent articles” ends and the “other recent stuff” begins.
- The post kinds are very visible: putting the “kind” of a post in its own column makes it really clear whether you’re looking at an article, note, checkin, etc., much more-so than my current blocks do.
90s web design was very-much characterised by:
- performance – nobody’s going to wait for your digital photos to download on narrowband connections, so you hide them behind descriptive links or tiny thumbnails, and
- pushing the boundaries – the pre-CSS era of the Web had limited tools, but creators worked hard to experiment with the creativity that was possible within those limits.
Those actually… aren’t bad values to have today. Sure, we’ve probably learned that animated backgrounds, tables for layout, and mystery meat navigation were horrible for usability and accessibility, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still innovation to be done. What comes next for the usable Web, I wonder?
The only thing I can fault it on is that it assumes that I’d favour Netscape Navigator: in fact, I was a die-hard Opera-head for most of the nineties and much of the early naughties, finally switching my daily driver to Firefox in 2005.
I certainly used plenty of Netscape and IE at various points, though, but I wasn’t a fan of the divisions resulting from the browser wars. Back in the day, I always backed the ideals of the “Viewable With Any Browser” movement.
I guess I still do.
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