Does it really matter?
The main topic of this column is my personal relationship to the activity of building
a web site. In that light, the question of just how sites were designed over ten
years ago really isn't particularly pertinent.
Except that the ongoing changes in web design, and the continually developing
expertise necessary to meet ever newer and "higher" standards, play
an important role in my ongoing involvement in site building. Without a doubt
the central focus of a site is on having something (hopefully) worth reporting
to the world. But once the topic has been determined, the unavoidable question
becomes something along the lines of how should that reporting be designed. And
the answer to that question is always influenced by what I see around me. If a
menu bar running down the side of a page becomes standard, then my thinking runs
in that direction. And if that standard menu bar, instead of being a stationary,
never changing bar, expands and contracts to include sub-menus, then I'm going
to want to know how to do that.
Which brings me back to my recollection of what sites looked like "back then".
Since I'm very sure that I haven't initiated anything new in web page design,
any developments that I've integrated into the design of my sites have been the
result of seeing something and wanting to use it. But then again, since I want
the browsing experience on my sites to be self-explanatory, I'll only use something
"new" when it ... isn't anymore. So it's a good guess that I correctly
remember that way back then menu bars running down the page were, if used at all,
still not used very extensively.
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Go to: Me and HTML