Discussion
omarish: mine https://omarish.com
harrisonpage: https://isp.netscape.comhttps://www.compuserve.comhttp://www.catcam.com (not even https)
azangru: Richard Stallman's site? Very OG.https://stallman.org/Although I see someone has put a 1.5MB image at the top, whose intrinsic size is 2000 × 2588 px, but which was downsized to 320 × 400 px. That's not prioritizing function.
Yhippa: Your first link...I miss portals so much. Rip ig.
bryanhogan: I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style. Modern UI design has its merits.But yes, good designs are not flashy, e.g. I love the design of Astro Starlight ( https://starlight.astro.build/), a starter kit for documentation pages.So I also took inspiration from "simple designs" for my personal site: https://bryanhogan.com/
Yhippa: > I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style.Why?
lee_ars: I still maintain the Chronicles of George, which went live in Feb 2001 and whose design has more or less stayed exactly the same ever since:https://chroniclesofgeorge.comI eventually added proper css, bolted on https, and updated the html to something a little more modern and standards-compliant, but the site is still hand-coded, and looks pretty much the same as it has for a quarter-century.
dravine: The most OG style website I actively use on a regular basis is https://www.rockauto.comIt's fast to navigate and order parts from, works on every browser I've ever tried it in, and loads very fast because there's minimal unnecessary components to the entire site. I hope they never change it :)
jollyjerry: Love rockauto, in the same vein, but not used daily is https://www.mcmaster.com/
ge96: Where's that solar-powered website where the images are ditheredI guess it's this one https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/Also like the style of Japanese websites where they seem broken/don't expand to fit available screen but cool aesthetic still
heraldgeezer: https://4chan.org/ - classic imageboard
joelcares: I keep my animation portfolio pretty minimal, albeit with some fun: https://joelcares.net/
hmokiguess: This one has a special place in my heart https://www.tibia.com/news/
al_borland: The Cloudflare gate and large cookie warning with a multi-step opt-out kind of killed it for me before I could even give it a chance. It’s just an off putting welcome for a new user.
Esophagus4: For one, it is awful on mobile.We can have bare, simple sites while still making them accessible.
Dansvidania: Why is it awful? Most barebones websites are naturally responsive..
zadikian: I don't usually see this because it seems to require intentional design to work on mobile. The original post has an example that doesn't lay out well on mobile, or just a very tall and thin desktop window.
hmokiguess: yeah it's sad here's a webarchive version https://web.archive.org/web/20040701163325/http://www.tibia....
MajorBee: I, for one, found reading the text under the News section quite difficult to read. The combination of the font color and the spacing/kerning made it all appear like a character soup to me. It's possible this is something that has variable impact across populations though.Generally speaking though, I do think trying to paint 90s websites as some sort of utopian ideal of function and design is purely an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else. It is entirely possible to make fast, responsive, accessible, well-designed rich websites today, all without writing a word of JavaScript (not that including JS by itself is bad or anything). Do not mistake anti-user functions like heavy weight analytics and user tracking libraries, or poorly optimized and ill-architected code bundles as the current "state of the art".
