Web Design in the Late 90s: Part 1
UPDATE: Part 2 is here!
It was a time of excitement. Video games were being released in FULL 3D! Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys were at the height of their popularity. Cardboard cut-out cartoon characters had filthy putty-mouths. Game Boy was finally in color. A little boy traveled all over the world with no parents or even adults and captured animals to fight them against each other. Everything was exciting!
Amidst all the excitement, one thing was the most exciting thing of all: the internet. With Hotmail people could send letters to their pen pals that would arrive in minutes, rather than the days it would have taken standard mail to arrive. With a search engine such as Yahoo! or Excite people could find information on any topic in just seconds, rather than the hours it would have taken to find that same information at the library. This post, however, is about GeoCities.
Previously known by the names Beverly Hills Internet and later GeoPages, GeoCities was considered by many to be the most important part of the internet. In jut minutes, anybody could make a list of their favorite movies and embellish it with a guestbook, a hit-counter some smileys, and a blinking "Under Construction" sign. Those who were more tech-savvy occasionally even went so far as to arrange everything in a table, whether or not a table was appropriate for the content.
From pretty early on, GeoCities faced meager competition from mediocre imitations such as Angelfire and Tripod. Neither was nearly as desirable as GeoCities, though, as Angelfire had a nasty habit of randomly deleting hosted pages and was ridiculously limited in customization options, and Tripod had absolutely enormous popups that interfered with everything. Despite its obvious shortcomings, GeoCities was clearly the free host of choice, and everybody who knew anything knew this.
Unfortunately for the internet, the vast majority of GeoCities users had no clue how to make a good web page. Today I'll be using Adrianna's page, which hasn't been updated in a little over a decade yet somehow remains online, as an example of what web design used to be like, and how well it holds up today.
Right on the front page, there's an "under construction" message for one of the sections. This is something you'll find a lot if you browse these old pages, because any page that an author intended on updating at some undefined point in the future was marked as under construction. If "It's Covarr!" had been around back then, it would be labeled as under construction, as I make occasional modifications to the template and (gasp) even post new content sometimes.
If you click "ENTER ADRIANNA'S HOMEPAGE!" the first thing you'll see is the grammatically incorrect "Adrianna's Homepage WELCOME!!!", immediately followed by a blinking green warning that the page "has a lot of pictures and may take a little while to load." Of course, since Adrianna just leeched the images from other peoples' websites instead of copying them to her own web space, almost none of them work anymore. There are, on this page alone, 26 images that don't display and 8 that do. Keep in mind that of the 8 that display, 6 of them are exactly the same image, and all of them are GeoCities defaults. Some of the broken ones may also be duplicates, but I can't tell since they don't work.
This page is loaded with lists. Near the top is a list of general facts about Adrianna. Scrolling down you can see a list of pages belonging to five of her ten siblings, a list of some of her hobbies, a list of her favorite animals, a list of links about Cancer, a list of pages belonging to her online friends, a list of links to various other random websites, and a list of links to sites about her favorite music groups (including a group that she doesn't like and multiple Amy Grant links).
Interspersed between these lists are a paragraph about how she used to have cancer, an advertisement for another section of her site, a guestbook, a prayer, an advertisement for another section of her site, an Excite search box, a hit counter (which doesn't work because it's one of the broken images), a "thank you for visiting" message, and two "Email Me" links. Keep in mind that none of this is in any particular order, and it's all separated by horizontal rules (AKA large horizontal lines for those of you who don't know anything about HTML).
If somebody made a webpage like this today, that person would probably get punched in the throat and heavily criticized. This was made in the late '90s though, and so every single oddity was completely normal for the time. Also, Adrianna was only 14 at the time (which means that she's 24 now and probably a bit better at web design), so much of this can be forgiven.
The second link from her front page leads to "The Prayer Page (TPP)", which consists of five prayers which seem to have been chosen at random and are separated by horizontal rules, another broken hit counter, a guestbook which has been cleverly disguised as a prayer request form, a blinking green "God Bless!!!" sign, a blinking green "under construction" sign and three "email me" links. Something odd about the "email me" links on this page is that they each are capitalized differently:
Email Me
EMAIL ME
email me
The use of a guestbook as a prayer request form is something I've never seen anywhere else. The idea is that if you or somebody you know is sick, broke, about to go into surgery, or on the run from the mafia, you just fill out the form, and then anybody can read it and pray for whatever you requested. Surprisingly enough, this "prayer reguestbook" still works, and for some reason people have continued to fill out a request every few years despite the lack of updates to this page, and the likely lack of visitors. The most recent request on the list was made by my mom, for a little girl with cancer, EARLIER THIS YEAR. In fact, it was made just days after Adrianna's page had reached its 1-whole-decade-without-being-updated anniversary.
The next section of this site is referred to as "The Saint Page" from the front page on the site, but it refers to itself as "Saint stories". This page features two stories, one about St. Rose of Lima and the other about Maria Goretti. The Maria Goretti story contains a large "Today's Saint!" indicator which I'm guessing became outdated the day after it was made, as well as an image that says "Click Here Now!" but doesn't actually do anything when you click on it. A little bit of investigation tells me that the "Click Here Now!" image used to be something else until the site hosting it disappeared and an advertising site took its place. This is the only section of the site with no "Email me" links.
The fourth and final section of this site is the "prolife page". It contains a prayer which claims to be a "pro-life" prayer but seems to really be a "pro-life and anti-euthanasia" prayer. In addition, there are two images that don't work, a complaint about a Christmas music CD that Sony used to market, a short explanation of why Adrianna is against abortion, an "email me" link, and a button that says "This site is and probably always will be under construction!"
Why was that a button? Curious, I clicked on it. My computer stalled for a few seconds, and then started working again as if nothing had happened. Hmm, I thought. I clicked it again. At this point my email client opened up. Actually, two instances of it opened, which leads me to believe that the button worked the first time, it just took a while. What this means, though, is that this button is actually yet another "Email Me" link in disguise.
This site has a grand total of seven "Email me" links despite only having five pages of HTML, and the "email me" links are only on three of those pages. I haven't tried emailing her, as it would be impolite since I'm a complete stranger, and I don't want to waste my time since there's a strong chance she doesn't even have the same email address anymore.
This site has a grand total of thirty-two broken images, as well as one more which technically loads but is not the image that Adrianna intended. This is primarily due to the age of the site, but if she had hosted the images on her GeoCities account instead of direct-linking them from other sites then this problem would not have arisen.
This site has a grand total of thirty-nine outgoing links (not counting the guestbooks), of which only eight lead where they were originally intended. Of the remaining thirty-one, some lead to 404 errors, some lead to the same site as Adrianna intended but not the correct page (which has been taken down or moved to elsewhere on these sites), and some of these have been bought by advertisers. Once again, this problem is purely the result of age, but one of the laws of 1997 web design stipulated that no link must ever be checked when you update, and that broken links are A-Okay! I'm curious as to how many of those links were broken right from the start, and how many have become broken over time.
This post is already on the long side, and I'm only about halfway done. Stay tuned for the more tech-oriented Part 2 later this week (maybe even today or tomorrow) in which I discuss the broken HTML that holds Adrianna's site together, explaining what code isn't considered acceptable anymore and what code was never acceptable in the first place! And remember, she was only 14 at the time AND it was 1997, so please don't seek her out to criticize her.
UPDATE: Part 2 is here!
It was a time of excitement. Video games were being released in FULL 3D! Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys were at the height of their popularity. Cardboard cut-out cartoon characters had filthy putty-mouths. Game Boy was finally in color. A little boy traveled all over the world with no parents or even adults and captured animals to fight them against each other. Everything was exciting!
Amidst all the excitement, one thing was the most exciting thing of all: the internet. With Hotmail people could send letters to their pen pals that would arrive in minutes, rather than the days it would have taken standard mail to arrive. With a search engine such as Yahoo! or Excite people could find information on any topic in just seconds, rather than the hours it would have taken to find that same information at the library. This post, however, is about GeoCities.
Previously known by the names Beverly Hills Internet and later GeoPages, GeoCities was considered by many to be the most important part of the internet. In jut minutes, anybody could make a list of their favorite movies and embellish it with a guestbook, a hit-counter some smileys, and a blinking "Under Construction" sign. Those who were more tech-savvy occasionally even went so far as to arrange everything in a table, whether or not a table was appropriate for the content.
From pretty early on, GeoCities faced meager competition from mediocre imitations such as Angelfire and Tripod. Neither was nearly as desirable as GeoCities, though, as Angelfire had a nasty habit of randomly deleting hosted pages and was ridiculously limited in customization options, and Tripod had absolutely enormous popups that interfered with everything. Despite its obvious shortcomings, GeoCities was clearly the free host of choice, and everybody who knew anything knew this.
Unfortunately for the internet, the vast majority of GeoCities users had no clue how to make a good web page. Today I'll be using Adrianna's page, which hasn't been updated in a little over a decade yet somehow remains online, as an example of what web design used to be like, and how well it holds up today.
Right on the front page, there's an "under construction" message for one of the sections. This is something you'll find a lot if you browse these old pages, because any page that an author intended on updating at some undefined point in the future was marked as under construction. If "It's Covarr!" had been around back then, it would be labeled as under construction, as I make occasional modifications to the template and (gasp) even post new content sometimes.
If you click "ENTER ADRIANNA'S HOMEPAGE!" the first thing you'll see is the grammatically incorrect "Adrianna's Homepage WELCOME!!!", immediately followed by a blinking green warning that the page "has a lot of pictures and may take a little while to load." Of course, since Adrianna just leeched the images from other peoples' websites instead of copying them to her own web space, almost none of them work anymore. There are, on this page alone, 26 images that don't display and 8 that do. Keep in mind that of the 8 that display, 6 of them are exactly the same image, and all of them are GeoCities defaults. Some of the broken ones may also be duplicates, but I can't tell since they don't work.
This page is loaded with lists. Near the top is a list of general facts about Adrianna. Scrolling down you can see a list of pages belonging to five of her ten siblings, a list of some of her hobbies, a list of her favorite animals, a list of links about Cancer, a list of pages belonging to her online friends, a list of links to various other random websites, and a list of links to sites about her favorite music groups (including a group that she doesn't like and multiple Amy Grant links).
Interspersed between these lists are a paragraph about how she used to have cancer, an advertisement for another section of her site, a guestbook, a prayer, an advertisement for another section of her site, an Excite search box, a hit counter (which doesn't work because it's one of the broken images), a "thank you for visiting" message, and two "Email Me" links. Keep in mind that none of this is in any particular order, and it's all separated by horizontal rules (AKA large horizontal lines for those of you who don't know anything about HTML).
If somebody made a webpage like this today, that person would probably get punched in the throat and heavily criticized. This was made in the late '90s though, and so every single oddity was completely normal for the time. Also, Adrianna was only 14 at the time (which means that she's 24 now and probably a bit better at web design), so much of this can be forgiven.
The second link from her front page leads to "The Prayer Page (TPP)", which consists of five prayers which seem to have been chosen at random and are separated by horizontal rules, another broken hit counter, a guestbook which has been cleverly disguised as a prayer request form, a blinking green "God Bless!!!" sign, a blinking green "under construction" sign and three "email me" links. Something odd about the "email me" links on this page is that they each are capitalized differently:
Email Me
EMAIL ME
email me
The use of a guestbook as a prayer request form is something I've never seen anywhere else. The idea is that if you or somebody you know is sick, broke, about to go into surgery, or on the run from the mafia, you just fill out the form, and then anybody can read it and pray for whatever you requested. Surprisingly enough, this "prayer reguestbook" still works, and for some reason people have continued to fill out a request every few years despite the lack of updates to this page, and the likely lack of visitors. The most recent request on the list was made by my mom, for a little girl with cancer, EARLIER THIS YEAR. In fact, it was made just days after Adrianna's page had reached its 1-whole-decade-without-being-updated anniversary.
The next section of this site is referred to as "The Saint Page" from the front page on the site, but it refers to itself as "Saint stories". This page features two stories, one about St. Rose of Lima and the other about Maria Goretti. The Maria Goretti story contains a large "Today's Saint!" indicator which I'm guessing became outdated the day after it was made, as well as an image that says "Click Here Now!" but doesn't actually do anything when you click on it. A little bit of investigation tells me that the "Click Here Now!" image used to be something else until the site hosting it disappeared and an advertising site took its place. This is the only section of the site with no "Email me" links.
The fourth and final section of this site is the "prolife page". It contains a prayer which claims to be a "pro-life" prayer but seems to really be a "pro-life and anti-euthanasia" prayer. In addition, there are two images that don't work, a complaint about a Christmas music CD that Sony used to market, a short explanation of why Adrianna is against abortion, an "email me" link, and a button that says "This site is and probably always will be under construction!"
Why was that a button? Curious, I clicked on it. My computer stalled for a few seconds, and then started working again as if nothing had happened. Hmm, I thought. I clicked it again. At this point my email client opened up. Actually, two instances of it opened, which leads me to believe that the button worked the first time, it just took a while. What this means, though, is that this button is actually yet another "Email Me" link in disguise.
This site has a grand total of seven "Email me" links despite only having five pages of HTML, and the "email me" links are only on three of those pages. I haven't tried emailing her, as it would be impolite since I'm a complete stranger, and I don't want to waste my time since there's a strong chance she doesn't even have the same email address anymore.
This site has a grand total of thirty-two broken images, as well as one more which technically loads but is not the image that Adrianna intended. This is primarily due to the age of the site, but if she had hosted the images on her GeoCities account instead of direct-linking them from other sites then this problem would not have arisen.
This site has a grand total of thirty-nine outgoing links (not counting the guestbooks), of which only eight lead where they were originally intended. Of the remaining thirty-one, some lead to 404 errors, some lead to the same site as Adrianna intended but not the correct page (which has been taken down or moved to elsewhere on these sites), and some of these have been bought by advertisers. Once again, this problem is purely the result of age, but one of the laws of 1997 web design stipulated that no link must ever be checked when you update, and that broken links are A-Okay! I'm curious as to how many of those links were broken right from the start, and how many have become broken over time.
This post is already on the long side, and I'm only about halfway done. Stay tuned for the more tech-oriented Part 2 later this week (maybe even today or tomorrow) in which I discuss the broken HTML that holds Adrianna's site together, explaining what code isn't considered acceptable anymore and what code was never acceptable in the first place! And remember, she was only 14 at the time AND it was 1997, so please don't seek her out to criticize her.
UPDATE: Part 2 is here!
posted by Covarr at 8:54 AM
Permanent Link | Linking Blogs | 3 comments
3 Comments:
I'm sure she'd update the page, but Heaven isn't wired with internet access yet.
Oh, I wasn't aware she'd died. Nothing about it in the guestbook or anything. Doesn't excuse 1997's web design trends though.
I was gonna do an article like this anyway and I happened to find Adrianna's page from your own GeoCities page (which you continue to leave a link to on your blog's sidebar despite having gone years without updating it yourself). Adrianna's page seemed to fit the theme of my post pretty much perfectly so I used it.
If you'd like, I could go through your GeoCities page sometime and re-do it with modern design and no errors or faulty code.
My own geocities page hasn't been updated in almost as long. I use it mostly to store small files that Blogger won't, including my favicon.
You can tell it's old, because Ceidwen is in seventh or eighth grade in her picture, and you aren't even mentioned.
Post a Comment
<< Home