...and www went boom!

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Early internet and e-commerce adopters

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The mid-1990s saw the internet really take off and by the late 90s it went completely wild with the dot-com bubble expanding exponentially till it finally burst in 2000. Anyone who was anyone had to have a web presence regardless of whether they had anything to sell, or even particularly promote, to a foetal online audience. 

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Despite poor bandwidth and limited development tools, in those early days customers wanted the bells and whistles with all the hard-to-manage file sizes for images, video and animation that would have little ROI. As with any new medium, designers had a field day and together with developers pushed the virtual envelopes. Before long more-or-less anything seemed possible.

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I was lucky to get in on the 'new media' scene at the beginning, before web design courses popped up in every college and university and flooded the market with ten-a-penny web designers operating from their bedrooms. 

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Here's a handful of those early sites I designed for a variety of customers including; political parties, councils, HE sector, telecoms, logistics, and retail. They might look clumsy now, with a lot of content crammed into almost unimaginably teeny screens, but - and you'll have to take my word for it - were pretty hot at the time. For example, the horizontal scrolling on the Labour election website had not been done before. And, the backdrop design on the Spain Direct product pages was radically new. Admittedly that doesn't necessarily make for a good UX in today's terms, but back then UX wasn't even a thing! Hahahaha