Early 2000 web design
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This write up is inspired by this Article I saw on Hackernews. Reading through, I felt nostalgic and decided to write a list of things that got me excited doing web design on the early 2000s.
1. Yeah, Marquee was indeed Awesome. This is a one
This was one of those things you learned to use that made your website stand out. Getting a piece of text and make it scroll across the screen., in any direction you wanted. When you used this, you were regarded as a master developer. It was so cool. And like everything web though, overuse started making it clunky. Eventually, we had folks write articles on why it was bad to use marquee, so we stopped.
2. BrainBench!
If you were not a Brainbench certified HTML guru, you didn’t know your shit. It was a bragging right. You even had the logo on any website you designed. I had that shit on my CV back then looking for a web design job during my early university semester breaks. It was the right online test that tested how you combined the HTML tags, making sure the title tag doesn’t come before the opening head tag.
Be a brain bench certified HTML guru, learn how to copy and paste javascript codes from the internet and you are suddenly an accomplished web designer.
3. View Source
I guess one of the things that made the art of web design popular back then was the fact that you could right click in the browser and view the source of all web pages on the internet. After learning HTML, the next natural thing to do was to start viewing sources all over the place. It built confidence to know an effect was achieved with the HTML tag you just learnt.
Even though developers still view source today, it was way different back then. Back then, it was like viewing the source code for Windows OS.
4. Type HTML from tag to tag.
A lot of folks, including myself started writing HTML with notepad. It was one of those ‘languages’ you write and you felt like a real geek. It was cool and it was a bragging right. I even remember teaching a couple of folks how to write HTML and I actually told them writing by hand was better.Write it, save it as .html and open it with internet explorer, and keep refreshing the page anytime you update the notepad.
Overtime we got to learn about Microsoft frontpage and eventually Dreamweaver. If you’ve mastered HTML though, like a Brainbench master, (LOL), you won’t need a WYSIWYG editor (Like they were called then).
5. Ampersand &anything;
Apart of the non-breaking spaces to add space between any two texts, there were also a ton of similar relics used aggressively back then. While some are still in use today, these were the hallmarks of web design then, beyond the regular texts. Some I can remember from my head include:
  - Space • - bullet © - copyright, still used today ® - registered trademark » - >> In place of bullets