Information Superhighway and Memory Lane

One week since launching the new Modern Alchemy web site, so I’m going to indulge in one more stroll down the electronic memory lane.

I’ve been making web sites for close to fifteen years, now, which is a very long time in cyberspace. (For some really, really old web pages, check out the links in this fascinating article on the history of html). I’ve picked out a few screenshots from older pages, to review and consider.

So far as I can tell, I have no copies of the first web site I designed as a freshman at dear auld ISU. This is kind of surprising because I’ve saved nearly everything; I have copies of high school assignments originally composed using some paleolithic version of Microsoft Works on an IBM PS/1. But that first web site was created back before I had a computer of my own on campus. (Which, itself, is remarkable to recall; I suspect that the percentage of American college students without their own computer these days is microscopic.) If I ever made any offline backups, they were probably kept on floppy disks(!!)

It’s both good and bad that I can’t present any glimpses of that old web site, because as one would imagine it was awful. Quite a lot of sites, even big, important professional sites, were awful in those days, and in my defense, the tools were just not ready. Remember the “browser wars,” with Microsoft and Netscape (R.I.P.) introducing new features far more quickly than nascent standards could keep up with? Remember the maddening text display issues that caused normal sized text on a Macintosh to appear too large on a Windows machine, or (more often) Windows-optimized text to appear almost illegibly-tiny on a Mac?

The html (learned very informally, mostly from bad examples) of that first web site was atrocious as, again, most html was in those days. A mess of <font> tags and nested tables and spacer GIFs. (Aside from all that it was just pretty atrocious in general; I like to think I have good skills with color and typography these days, but I wasn’t born with them.)

My second web site effort, the intentionally very-modestly titled “A Sequence of Pages,” was a kind of improvement.

There was at least some sense of order and structure here, and while white-on-black text has fortunately been abandoned for the most part, it probably still marked an advance over the first site’s white on bright blue text.

For a student, at the time, this probably wasn’t all that bad. As I say, there was some structure, and there were certainly no dancing hamster GIFs or <blink> tags. Behind the scenes it was still pretty ugly, continuing to employ some of the worst elements of bad html (tables, spacer GIFs, etc.) and combining them with atrociously-misunderstood Cascading Style Sheets. In fact there were no actual style sheets in this site’s CSS; everything was tagged in-line just like the old <font> tag methods, completely missing the point of CSS. Though, in fairness, I’m not entirely sure how complete the CSS specifications even were in the late 1990s.

Thankfully, by the early 21st century, the dust from the browser wars had largely settled, and the champions of web standards had made significant progress in getting 1) standards that could actually be used to create the kind of visually-sophisticated sites that people wanted and 2) browsers that respected the standards. One such champion was designer Jeffrey Zeldman, whose book Designing with Web Standards has been a kind of bible for me.

Thanks to Zeldman’s ability to present HTML and CSS standards in an accessible and even entertaining fashion, I was able to create a third-generation graphic designer web site which actually got away from most of the bad old HTML while still incorporating more advanced typography and layouts than ever.

The design, yeah, it doesn’t really thrill me. I’m not entirely sure where I was coming from with the lavender background or the dashed-line arrow. But there were some good things going on. It surprises me in retrospect, though, what wasn’t going on. Where are the rollover effects for hyperlinks, for example? Nowhere outside of the side menu; all of the other links just sit there.

Which brings me back to modernalchemy.biz version 1.0. I feel safe in saying that this site saw improvement across the board, with better CSS, better layout, better color use. I think only two main things marked this site as due for replacement.

First was, as noted in an earlier post, the lack of adaptation for wider screens and browser windows. This site was still, as I think was somewhat more common at the time of its creation, glued to the left side and dependent on a browser window close to its width to look like it should. Having since gotten a handle on floating a site in the center, v2.0 looks more graceful even in a very wide browser window.

Second was the portfolio. I’m proud of the portfolio menu in this site, but looking back, the decision to make it a dominant element on every page was a wrong turn. The portolio is important in a design site, but not so important that all text content should be reduced to the status of a sidebar. I’ll also confess that the portfolio navigation left a little to be desired, mostly because the location of control buttons jumped around; this is much-improved in the new site and one can breeze through all of the main stops in the portfolio without ever moving the pointer between clicking.

(If you visited the older site and didn’t notice, well, that’s good; in an imperfect world it’s a relief to know that one’s errors are sometimes mild enough to be forgiveable. But I noticed. It’s my job to notice things like that, and to fix them, and in this case a job well done is a modest reward of its own.)

(Though hiring Modern Alchemy to design a site for which there is actual monetary reward would not be unwelcome.)