I am in mood for nostalgia,maybe because it is exactly a year and 1 day since I first blogged on WATBlog. Nevertheless, my nostalgic trip made me think about the good ol’ days of making websites. The days when we used to put shiny blue text on black backgrounds and hosted websites on Geocities and Lycos and the likes of them.
Which reminded me of some of the trendiest things which were almost a must have on any website back in the day. Here are some of them that came to my mind and are now long gone:
1. Guestbook
Having a guestbook where visitors could leave comments and messages was a uber cool feature back in 2001. I for one would have done anything to get it up on site, though unfortunately most free hosting providers put this one as a premium feature. And then there were grey and there were colourful buttons which would say ‘please sign on my guest book’.Now we have blogs and blogs have comments, so long guest books.
2. Shiny Animated Buttons
Speaking of sign my guest book buttons, there were ultra shiny and immensely gory buttons that people used to have on their websites. Of course just that back then they seemed really cool pieces of digital art. There were countless tutorials on how to make web buttons using Photoshop 3.5 on the web those days. Then came the animated buttons which usually just changed colours much to the pleasure of webmasters. Now can’t see them much.
Shiny Buttons FTW!
3. Link to Us
I think a lot of people still do this these days, and maybe some SEO guys recommend it also, but by and large most sites have stopped this trend. Earlier many popular sites used to have pages where they put their banners or text links that others can put on their website and send them traffic for free. There were guys like me who used to think that no website is ready until there are banners on it and so used to do oblige them willingly. Thankfully I grew up and this trend died down.
4. Hit Counters
Google Analytics might be bringing them back, but hit counters with even fake starting numbers were an era on to themselves. The fake number thing was quite funny, these hit counter makers would smartly suggest -”you don’t want a user to know or think they are the first one’s to be on your site..that would be lame, so use our counters which begin at 0123..” or something to that effect. Funny part is a lot of publishers still do fake their numbers.
5. Tables
Alright, they haven’t quite died yet, but I hope they do. Tables were at a point of time the most complicated thing to learn in HTML, I was a master at it though and so was disappointed when CSS came and dispelled the need for tables in webs design. A lot of people still use tables (and at times they may still be necesarry) but frankly it is just lack of evolution on their part than any specific design need. Say hello to tableless design now guys.
6. Midi Files
Play songs when someone came to your websites. How irritating would that seem now, but back in the hood it was an ultimate feature on a website and midi files were the norm. Pity I don’t hear about them anymore and thankfully I don’t hear music when I go to people’s sites either. Don’t midi me.
Those were the days.
Anything else that any of you remember from the time between 1999 -2005, that are not surprisingly not in vogue anymore?
Happy anniversary maneesh! You certainly are one of WATBlog’s Best Bloggers!
So true! I had all of these on the first website I made for myself on Geocities.
There were other things too like animated gifs that follow the cursor, and scrolling text on the browser’s status bar. Frames was another in-thing back in those days.
Thanks
@Yash ..yeah scrolling text and frames how can I forget them..
you should include forums too… they come as a part of every hosting… would soon become obsolete unless you are just a forum
You can still see counters on some websites. Take for instance “www.trai.gov.in”. On the left handside you will see the counter with the following text
“Last modified on:
1 Jun 2009 ”
Don’t know why they need to show this on 4th June
Midi Files are quite irritating especially if you are in office environment. I remember being getting embarassed for opening one such site recently and everybody in the office started staring at me…
Check out another instance of a thing of web 1.0 era – the falling objects or “Mohabbatein” script on http://www.seventymm.com. It might be gone tomorrow. But its funny!
@Rohit Agarwal, govt sites will never evolve. They still show the “Best viewed in IE 5 or Netscape at 800×600 resolution” notice
By the way that best viewed in…. notice was also one such thing.
@Kaustubh
Yes sites just being forums might not be viable anymore..but they are still used very much especially vBulletin driven ones..so I guess we can pass them for now
@Rohit hehe yeah.. Govt sites are our online museums.. let them be preserved in their old glory
@Yash lol
well there are many such new things coming up these days
too
the most common is follow us on tweeter
well after a few days or may be few years it will be in that list too
hehehe isnt it