Just realized how much web design changed between 1996 and 1999

I was digging through an old Zip disk last week and found the first website I ever built back in 1996. It had this bright green background with red text, a dozen animated GIFs, and a guestbook that I checked obsessively. Then I looked at a site I made in late 1999 for a band I was in, and it had CSS layouts, actual navigation menus, and no blinking text at all. The difference over just three years was wild - it went from pure chaos to something that actually worked. What's the biggest change you've noticed on the old web between different years?

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the_joel2d ago

Remember my first attempt at a personal homepage in 1996 with a tiled starry background and a MIDI file that auto-played. You basically had to install a separate program just to make a table. But by 1999 I had built a site for my local computer club using actual CSS and it looked clean and professional, nothing like that mess from a few years earlier. The weirdest part is how quickly the grunge aesthetic of the early web just vanished. That whole era of bright colors and cheesy animations felt like it lasted forever until you look back and realize it was only a few years of pure digital chaos.