Top Web Design Styles of 1993
contemporary-home-computing.orgDon't forget that it's about as long since this blog post was written to today as from 1993.
The idea of making webpages in Photoshop and using a lot of gradients is something that today sounds very quaint - people say society's stagnated since then but that's something where it's definitely not true.
Around the time this page was written I was still building enormously graphic-rich websites in Adobe Flash, which was my first introduction to real programming. For whatever reason, despite most of Flash's functionality being incorporated into (and deployment issues being resolved by) modern Javascript, I've done a complete 180 and gone in the other direction. All of my hobby web-design is completely Spartan in comparison. Almost as a rebellion against the excesses of the modern web, so many developers now pride themselves on how minimal we can make our sites!
There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.
(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)
[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.
I made pretty good money as a freelance flex dev circa 2015, I miss it sometimes.
Surprised to see Dreamweaver still on Adobe's website; I remember being taught website design with it during computer class back in the late 2000s, definitely a completely different paradigm to the modern web.
if you think that's crazy, this is still sold as well: https://www.unisys.com/product-info-sheet/ecs/clearpath-mast...
that's not the mcp you think it is...it's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP
If you think that's surprising, what about the fact that they're still maintaining ColdFusion? https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html
ColdFusion is the COBOL of web programming… there is some human at an insurance/mortgage servicing company thats not had to learn a new tag in 5 years pulling in 200k.
>people say society's stagnated since then but that's something where it's definitely not true.
In some ways it is.
Instead of people making personal websites, controlling their stack, and having knowledge of the tech as the default, we've regressed to a few consolidated services and people having no understanding other than "I put my text in that WYSIWYG textbox".
Arguably, it's democratized people putting things on the internet. But because there's less work involved to do so, there's also less effort put in.
It's not new - anyone could write a low effort shitpost in a text input, I know I did 20+ years ago - but I do believe that a website or any product becomes better if it takes more effort to make it in the first place.
I'm also thinking of early iOS apps, where loads of people balked because of the very long app submission guidelines, the $99 barrier to entry and the week-long critical Apple review - but it gave Apple a huge advantage as generally speaking, iOS apps were good, Android apps were mediocre or at the very least highly inconsistent, quality wise.
Written in 2010 about websites of 1993 and viewed here, in 2026.
Way more functional than anything in 2026.
The screenshot of Firefox makes me miss the days when it had a usable UI.
Interesting to see the complaint about ‘zombie links’ which seems like such a small trivial nitpick.