John Wang

Once upon a time (1994), free web hosting was available with no advertisements. Your web host limited you to a size of 2 MB.  And URLs were even more obscure. These were the days of GeoCities, Tripod, and Angelfire. It was hard to tell someone to visit your website when your URL was in the form of http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/temple/4460. Enter the social web of the 90s, Web Rings. The SEO technique of submitting your website to a circular network of similar subject websites that required a small badge on your website.

This was were my adventures in web design started. I began with GeoCities in 1996. Having to own an entire block of a neighborhood to host images due to the 2MB limit, which was later raised to 5MB then 10MB, etc. Joined Web Rings to promote my websites. Stuffing as much keyword meta tags as possible. And submiting them of the search engines of the world. Search Engines before Google exists. AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, DogPile, MetaCrawler, InfoSeek, Northen Light, WebCrawler, HotBot, and Yahoo.

Back then, there was no CSS to style your site. People had to used HTML Tables instead of Divs. Animated Gifs and background Midi music ruled the web. These were the days of Netscape Navigator, where you needed to use a text editor or Dreamweaver to code a website.

Enter the era of Microsoft FrontPage, HomeSite, and Adobe Go-Live. Now anyone can create a website if they know how to use Microsoft Word. And everyone did just that. WYSIWYG allowed anyone to put up a website. Failure to have valid code never mattered. W3C had no impact on anyone. And FrontPage extensions to boot.

The new century quickly brought us the world of blogging through Blogger, MovableType and LiveJournal. I first started a LiveJournal blog thanks to TechTV‘s Megan Morrone providing me an invite. It was the beginning of many things to come. In a world now dominated by WordPress, TypePad, MovableType, and Blogger.

Not much later, in 2002, Friendster came out. The beginning of Social Networks. Quickly following suit were MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. The current state of the web now dominated by Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other Social Networks. Web 2.0 has taken the world by storm and it’s showing no signs of letting go.

Care to share you history of web design? How did you get started in this business?

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