Looking back at 1998
Last night I spent more than three hours viewing old websites which I have archived on my computer. The oldest was from 1998, and it was my second own website. This was of course long before I knew what CSS really was, and the site was designed with very traditional HTML using nested tables, font tags, spacer gifs and the whole package. It was cool back then, and when I launched that site I was often told that I was a good designer - because of all those things that are considered to be ugly and old-fashioned today.
Looking back, it is easy to see that the web was pretty wild. It makes it easy to appreciate the web standards and to love the whole concept of CSS design. But I was surprised by one thing with the archived sites: They looked really good! When I try to remember them, I remember all the code, all the tables, all the formatting and all the trouble it was to change the sitewide layout because of the inline styling and browser-specific tags. I had totally forgotten that the designs still looked great despite all this. The code was not pretty, but some of the designs would work even today.
Some day, I will launch an archive with all these sites. It is after all a major piece of my life, especially the many websites that Lagoona had. I have got several e-mails from old fans of Lagoona, asking me to put the gig reports and news archives online again, and I have already promised to do it. After viewing these sites I also realize that I was publishing a kind of blog as early as 1997, although it was of course very primitive. It was a date-based diary, with entries listed in reversed chronological order with the three latest entries on my frontpage and the rest in an archive. I was even accepting comments, although they were sent over e-mail and added to my "entries" manually by me. It was really amazing to read through all the entries and remember the amazing adventures from the past. I have never considered myself to be any "blogger", but if I would gather all diary entries that I have published on the web I would have 1700+ entries - spread out over nine years.
I haven't realized the personal value of these stored sites until now, and I am really happy that the sites and designs have survived. I've learned a lot about myself after reading through the archives, and I still have a lot more to read. Most of it is not in any way interesting to anyone else than me, but it still feels like I have discovered a forgotten treasure…
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Comment from isecore
Time: April 3, 2006, 4:49
Yes, those were the bad old days. God, to think that people designed websites using all that crap. Scary, even I've done it a billion times. Nested tables, frames, font-tags. Ugh!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Comment from LobsterMan
Time: April 3, 2006, 17:40
Cool stuff there. the third one looks pretty decent even today. i'm afarid to look back at my first (attempted) designs, they used the whole table mess, even though I started web development in 2002. well, that's what happens when you learn html from outdated online tutorials. I only learned about css when I finally bought a book about (x)html/css. and it was actually the first time i ever heard of xhtml…
Comment from Andreas
Time: April 3, 2006, 18:22
Converting the designs is a great idea, I'll probably do that. It would be interesting to make a direct comparisation between a traditional design from 1998 and the same design made with XHTML and CSS in 2006 - maybe even with a conversion tutorial included…
LobsterMan: I have actually never read any books about web design. I used a little CSS back in the 1999 designs (link styling) but back then I didn't know that CSS was so much more than that…
Comment from DJ_Xander/Thalo Blue
Time: April 3, 2006, 20:30
There's a time for being nostalgic…
I came on http://www.waybackmachine.org and saw a part of what lagoonamusic.com looked like since march 2002… I tried with baygroove.com and andreasviklund.com too, intesresting.
I wish you to have new discoveries in the future!
DJ_Xander
Comment from DJ_Xander/Thalo Blue
Time: April 3, 2006, 20:33
I forgot something about the second old school picture: NICE!
Comment from Ferenc Kato
Time: April 5, 2006, 19:20
Andreas, I am an elderly Hungarian guy. What happened to Lagoona! ? What happened to you in the last 4 yrs or so?
Regards Ferenc
Comment from seanrox
Time: April 3, 2006, 4:36
That's really cool! I also archive all my old sites and client sites as well.
Every now and then I look back and think the same things as you. Wow, how the times have changed for sure in the design word.
What would be cool is to take your old designs and convert them so no more tables, inline styling, etc and use css, then post them on a portfolio or demo page.
Like you said, most of your designs would hold up with today's standards if you converted them over.
You could even maybe release them as templates :)