Watched my local library's site go from a plain text page in 1996 to a whole mess of frames in 1998

Thea Garcia · 2026-09-21T22:05:03.954248+00:00

I grew up in Bakersfield and my mom would drop me at the Beale Memorial Library every Saturday starting around 1996. The first version of their site was just black text on a white page, a phone number, and a list of hours. I loved it, honestly. You could actually find the branch hours in like ten seconds. Then around 1998 they did a redesign with three frames stacked on top of each other and animated books that spun in the corner. It took almost two minutes on our 56k and half the links went nowhere. I asked the teen librarian about it and she said some committee wanted it to look modern. I still think the ugly plain version was the better site. Did anyone else's local library or school do this kind of glow up that actually made things worse?

🐿️Pinecone Attack

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Watched my local library's site go from a plain text page in 1996 to a whole mess of frames in 1998 | 90s Internet Memories - Pinecone Attack