How I made a 90s version of my landing page
I started making websites around 1998 and I fondly remember my first personal homepage as it was called back then. There were GIFs, rolling text and pictures of skateboards and hockey players. Damn it was fun to make. Then, waking up one morning about 6 months ago, I just felt like “what the hell, I should make a 90s version of my landing page for Wobaka”. After putting the project off for months, one evening I decided to get cracking and boy, did I have a lot of fun!
Read along for the full story. You can check out the site here: https://90s.wobaka.com
No CSS, No Problem
I really wanted to make this website as I made sites back in the 90s. So adding a bunch of CSS to make it work didn’t feel quite right. It was also a fun challenge and I enjoyed the constraint of working without CSS.
This also meant I had to try to remember how I actually made things happen back then. Things like <font> tags with color and size to style text and using the good old bgcolor='#000000' for setting background color.
Here's a little taste of what the code looks like, but feel free to check out the source yourself. It's very easy to read!
Of course, I didn’t forget to include a lot of GIFs and a <marquee> text as well. As no 90s website would be complete without it :).
Getting to the front page of Reddit
The response was amazing. People really loved it and discussed a lot of nostalgic moments. The site made it to the front page of reddit after submitting it to internetisbeautiful and received tens of thousands of visits. The marquee and GIFs were especially appreciated. However, some people did think the homepage lacked a crazy pattern background 😅.
Others even said they prefered the 90s version to my real landing page. I don’t know what to make of that, but it got me thinking. Perhaps we’re adding too much stuff to our websites today?
Go and make your own 90s version!
I hope this inspires you to have more fun with code, as sometimes we get to serious about building things. Whatever it inspires you to make, feel free to reach out and share it, I’d love to check it out 😊!
