Why this website looks as it does
In addition to disseminating information related to the research project ‘Histories of the Danish web in the 1990s’, the aim of this website is to mirror what a typical website looked like in the early mid-1990s, when the website as a whole was often called ‘homepage’.
The most striking difference to contemporary websites is the menu that ensures the navigation between the pages. In the early mid-1990s when the visual web browser Mosaic became widespread the most used form of website menu on the front page was the ‘splash screen’ with icons (or similar) linking to sub-pages. And on sub-pages some sort of table with menu items enabled further navigation from these web pages. Also, the house-icon that took the user back to the front page (often also called ‘homepage’) was commonly used. In addition, a text version and a guest book were widely used forms of expression, along with a news ticker, animated graphics (including lots of ‘Under construction’ graphics), and information about number of visitors and about what web browser the website was optimised for. Finally, in-line hyperlinks were widespread, allowing web users to jump to another web page from anywhere in the body text.
It is also worth noticing what is not here: the number of graphics is limited, no photos, no video, no share buttons to social media, and limited possibilities of interactivity.
All the above features have been included in this website, together with a certain amateurish look-and-feel. Thus, except for needed contemporary features such as cookie consent and privacy policy, visitors to this website will experience the web in a 1990s way, including a very different navigation experience when used to a menu bar that is either a horisontal drop-down menu, or a left aligned vertical menu. What is described above was largely how web users were ‘surfing the web’ in the 1990s.
The website is constructed based on several sources of inspiration:
- The overall structure of the front page as well as the background colour of the entire website is inspired by the first iconic website of the White House, whitehouse.gov with an image at the centre and a number of graphics left and right to the image, see version in Web Design Museum.
- Sub-pages with a ‘home’-button and a logo on the top of the page (left and right, respectively) are inspired by the Lego website from 1996.
- The logo with the three Ws is a twist of the famous WWW logo designed by Robert Cailliau, but with the three Ws overlapping in a different way, and with the colours of the present website (see below).
- This website includes a blog, that is a web page with regularly updates in the form of posts presented in reverse-chronological order, despite the fact that blogs (or weblogs, as they were initially called) did not become widespread until just after 2000; however, the blogging platform Blogger was launched in 1999 so a blog could be found on the web in the late 1990s.
- In the 1990s serif fonts were widely used for the body text whereas sans-serif was often used for menu items; on the present website a sans-serif has been chosen for menu items as well as for the body text to make the overall on-screen readability as good as possible.
- Colours are taken from the official colour palette of Aarhus University where the primary identity colour is blue (RGB 0, 61, 115) and cyan is one of the secondary colours (RGB 55, 160, 203).
- A horisontal separator was often used, and in many cases it was in the form of a piece of graphics with various colours, patterns and thickness.
The website is constructed in WordPress 6.6.1, with as little use of the WordPress features as possible, that is: as simple as possible with ‘flat’ html pages and a simple CSS.
Last updated 27 July 2024
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