I was leaving my job at a cable advertising firm on Newbury Street in Boston one Friday afternoon and saw a UPS truck with the characters www.ups.com printed directly under the phone number on the truck’s rear panel. Pretty unremarkable except for one thing. It was 1994. Now I’m not normally known as a prophet but I turned to my wife and said “someday every company is going to have one of those website thingys.” I don’t remember her exact reply but I think it was something about how only the bigger companies would be able to afford one. It all seems pretty funny right now doesn’t it? But as luck, or fate would have it, the very next Monday the IT Director at my company (it was called MIS back then, remember?) asked me if I wanted to “investigate this internet thing”. I was not on the IT staff. I was a temp doing administrative work to bolster my less than illustrious musical career. Turns out no one on his staff believed the “internet thing” would last. DOHHH!! I said sure, they sent me to an HTML class and, to quote the most overused cliche ever, the rest is history.

Tables, Drop Shadows and Scrolling Marquees, Oh My!

Several HTML classes later, and with just enough Photoshop knowledge to be dangerous, I developed my company’s first website. Its hard to remember this but it was so early in the game that Microsoft hadn’t entered the browser wars yet. It was Netscape 4 and that was it. This website had everything, and I do mean everything. Every graphic had a drop shadow, every button looked like an oval race track, every paragraph was a different font color and size, elements were placed in table cells to keep them from moving around, I even had a scrolling marquee going across the page. I was definitely a practitioner of the “kitchen sink” school of design where the answer to the question “why did you do that” is always “because I can”. But the real kick for me was that I had created something that anyone anywhere in the world could see. It didn’t matter that no one was looking. What mattered was that if they were looking, they would see something I created. Pretty powerful stuff!

When it Started Making Sense

I needed some direction. There had to be someone out there who was a thought leader in this new space. For me, and for many others at the time, that person was David Siegel and his seminal book Creating Killer Web Sites, circa 1997. Using what Siegel termed “guerilla HTML” I began to create more visually pleasing websites. David’s book seems dated now, but he has continued to be a thought leader. [Find out what he’s up to these days at Pull and the 21st Century.]

It’s been a fun ride. And with more and more people viewing websites on their mobile devices, the fun is just beginning.

Do you remember some of those early websites? What do you remember about them? How do you think websites have changed?