How did I make my first Website in 1998

It was 1998 when I realized that I need my first website. Not that I would need one back then. It was something new and unique that not many people had and I just wanted to show off that I got such thing. When I look at it retrospectively, I had rather become a carpenter or study archeology. After all, digging in the soil during cold rainy evenings has its charm :)

Anyway, let’s go back to the beginning when it all started. You certainly noticed that strange year when 95% of websites looked then as if today all your website’s CSS styles got burned down. Of course that myself, the emerging graphic designer, could not allow this to happen. I sit down naively at my tuned up 486-DX4 that had performance like one hand of Apple I-Watch nowadays and opened up Photoshop (it already existed). After five minutes of tense expectation I started drawing my first website that was going to look definitely better than anything I’ve had ever seen on the internet. I was messing around on internet for couple of weeks already, as I managed to get my new expensive modem up and running that had speed of 56kbps (yes kilobits per second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit and sometimes that second lasted for minutes).

Around this time I think I started smoking. Who knows why…

Deformed by creation of various posters, leaflets, CD and MC (audiotapes) covers, magazines and similar graphic atrocities, when I was limited only by the paper size and strange customer requests, I put together few drafts for my homepage, 3 sub pages and I got in touch with some guy who was to put it together for a bottle of wine. What more could you wish for…

Few days later an oddly looking creature showed up at my doorstep and announced that he’s going to program some website. I let him in, sat him down at my tuned up machine I was very proud of and I started showing him what to expect. After couple of minutes when he was silently turning his looks between my CRT monitor and my exciting face, he swallowed the air several times and finally asked, if I have the promised bottle of wine. And then it all started.

1. Problem — resolution:

The most common resolution in 1998 was 800x600px. Try to fit in a content of a fullscreen website with header, main menu, image with description and footer into the space of a mobile phone screen size and in such way, so that website visitor doesn’t need to scroll down. And of this 600px height, a large portion of space was occupied by various ugly looking buttons of Internet Explorer 4 and Windows 95 toolbar.

Solution: a pop up of new window with all the toolbars switched off — the popular technology of viruses that infested internet in the following years.

2. Problem — fonts:

Today almost forgotten issue. As soon as you came up with the idea of using different font from Arial or Times New Roman for your headings, you had a problem. Google fonts were a distant future, upload of your own fonts to your website was impossible and the list of available fonts that every user had installed on their computer was damn short.

Quite funny but common solution at the time was to cut out the required heading from the picture and put it on the page as an image. Of course including with the background, as the only transparent format was GIF. Google must have liked it much.

3. Problem — layout:

To stick a picture in photoshop anywhere on the screen, to add a color band behind it and to throw a piece of text on it somewhere asymmetrically is one thing. Different thing is the positioning of such objects in such conditions when the div tag may still does not exist.

… and CSS is still stuck somewhere in the garage on the other side of the planet.

Since I’m being stubborn, the guy, squinting at the waiting bottle of wine, had nothing else left but to engage all his brain cells, cut the entire page into cells in the tables and come up with a method of combining them in a way so that these hold together in some decent shape. After couple of hours of grinding teeth, when I was checking everything pixel by pixel if fits the way I drew it myself, we put together something that resembled my drafts. That thing that came to existence however worked only until the moment when I wanted to click on image number 2 in my portfolio.

4. Problem — navigation:

As soon as I clicked on the arrow to see the next image, my high performance modem started howling trying to connect to internet and my whole website disappeared for a few minutes from the world. By the time all the images and texts loaded again and the whole page layout got refreshed with the updated image somewhere in the middle, I was the one grinding teeth. The exhausted guy being on his last legs finally remembered some miraculous tag that enables retrieval of only certain part of the page and the rest remains unchanged. That miraculous tag had a name iframe. Google rediscovered it when they invented AMP, but more on that another time.

After several hours of fighting with HTML and in-line styling of my first website, mustering all our strength, we sent our creation to the server via FTP and the bottle of wine got a new owner. I was flaunting everyone with my masterpiece for couple of days until I attempted to open my beautiful new website in some weird browser that was called NetScape.

5. Problem — browser compatibility

Immediately when I saw my website falling apart before my eyes, I ran home (ordinary mortals did not own mobile phones back then) and I called my new friend to come over and fix it. After lengthy persuasion, when he still had fresh memories of who I am, he finally agreed and stopped by.

Enthusiasm for making any changes vanished as soon as he saw my website in Netscape browser and then in Opera. After my experience with per-pixel requirements, we managed to put together a script (I’m still proud of it), which tested the browser type. We even added an artificial progress bar which acted as if it was testing the computer configuration, if everything was allright. I remember how much fun we had while trying to come up with the text of the cordial greetings to the creators of the aforementioned browsers that was displayed as soon as the identified browser was a different one from Internet Explorer.

Subsequently we announced to the website visitor, with the calm of the Englishman, to get my site opened in Internet Explorer.

I fear that the script is still out there…

After this experience, I have been avoiding any opportunities to get involved in website creation whatsoever, which certainly prolonged my life by couple of sweet years I might spent in an institution for the elderly people. I still nostalgically remember the times when I was at home, drinking coffee and eating “third-party cookies”, while drawing variety of posters, banners and billboards that were screaming at me from the dilapidated walls of my hometown and my only concern was if I hadn’t once again overused the black color.

As days and years of my happy life were passing, I got convinced for a webdesign from time to time. I was getting familiar in more details with the world of websites and CSS capabilities, Javascript and PHP. Fascinated by my creations that can move, react, work fine and live its own life and excited that I do not have to pay attention to the intensity of black, I gradually lost vigilance.

And then one fine day my first cell phone rang and I met WordPress …

I hate websites.