Looking back in time and trying to remember what websites used to be like in 90s is hard. I remember the first websites I did were all image-based. We used to create a main image and then slice the images up into smaller, easier to load files and place them into tables on an HTML page and call that a website. There are still some table-based websites still running today. There was some consideration for having a page that wouldn’t take to long to load and providing alternative text for images but other than that it was fairly easy. Then Macromedia Flash came along and we could have cool animated websites. They weren’t exactly search engine friendly but we were more concerned with how the sites could show the brand than with how they looked to bots.
Of course, mobile usability wasn’t a concern.
Recently, I saw a screenshot of the first Amazon website. You can see how primitive it appears to be here:
A great place to explore older versions of websites is archive.org. Their Wayback Machine is one of the only ways I know to see old websites. It’s great to have an internet library to keep track of old sites for reference, I wish it had more sites.
Here are a couple of early websites we created
Netship – this one is from 1998.
The Cyphers Agency – This is our old Flash site
Explore more old websites here – http://mentalfloss.com/article/53792/17-ancient-abandoned-websites-still-work
