Okay, let’s dive into my little “1993 style” project. I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, and I wanted to recreate that old-school, pixelated, kinda clunky website look.
Digging Through the Past
First, I spent some time just browsing the Wayback Machine. I mean, who needs design inspiration boards when you’ve got the actual internet archive, right? I looked at a bunch of websites from the mid-90s, taking notes on what made them look, well, old.
Key Ingredients
Here’s what I noticed and jotted down:
- Lots of tables. Everything was laid out in tables. No fancy CSS grids here!
- Background images. Usually tiled, often textured, sometimes… questionable.
- Animated GIFs. You gotta have those spinning globes and flaming text, man.
- Basic fonts. Think Times New Roman, Arial, maybe some Comic Sans if you were feeling wild.
- Under construction signs. Because, let’s be honest, most sites back then were always under construction.
- Bold colors with little gradients. I need some really eye-catching colors that might not match perfectly.
Putting it Together
So, I fired up my text editor (nothing fancy, just a plain text editor, keeping it real) and started coding. I didn’t use any frameworks or libraries. Just straight-up HTML, like they did back in the day. I literally typed out <table>, <tr>, <td> – the whole nine yards. It felt… surprisingly good, actually.
I found some free textures online – a nice, repeating brick pattern for the background. Perfect! Then I whipped up some animated GIFs in some online free gif maker. A spinning “Welcome” sign, a little mailbox with a flapping flag… you know, the classics.
For the text, I stuck with Times New Roman. Classy, readable, and totally 1993. I added a guestbook – remember those? – using a simple form and some CGI scripting (which took me back, I tell you). I even included a hit counter! Because who doesn’t want to know how many people have visited their site?
The Final Result
It’s… glorious. It’s ugly. It’s perfect. It’s exactly the kind of website I would have stumbled upon back in the 90s, and I love it. It’s a little piece of internet history, brought back to life. I slapped an “Under Construction” GIF on one of the pages, just for good measure. I even used the <blink> tag! (Don’t tell anyone.) The color is red and black, very old school. I really made it!
This whole project was a fun trip down memory lane. It reminded me of how far the web has come, but also how much charm those early websites had. Simple, quirky, and full of personality. And hey I finished my work!
