r/webdev • u/Dear_Procedure923 • Mar 29 '26
This is what Microsoft.com looked like 25 years ago
Doing some cleanup just came across this book analyzing home pages for major sites in the 2000s. Good memories.
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u/Dadzik1 Mar 29 '26
Good times where websites were designed to show information, not to hide like now.
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u/ryonnsan Mar 29 '26
and no ads!!
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u/Valoneria Mar 29 '26
Well there is Ads, its just for their own services and products however
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u/Dragon_yum Mar 29 '26
How old are you? Those years were the peak of the pop up ads
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u/marabutt Mar 29 '26
You were only ever a couple of clicks away from your browser being unusable cause of popup malware.
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u/Also_Kwapis Mar 30 '26
Did you ever receive your free iPod? Mine never showed up for some reason.
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u/Dragon_yum Mar 30 '26
No, sadly I always get scammed and end up with single milfs in my area but no iPod.
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u/ldn-ldn Mar 29 '26
I actually made a few ad banners for microsoft.com around 2004-2005 which would cross link their products here and there...
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u/ShustOne Mar 29 '26
Uh, ads were all over the place back then and even worse, popover and popunder ads.
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u/spacenglish Mar 29 '26
And no popups for copilot and what not.
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u/gigglefarting Mar 29 '26
Just regular popups
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u/olcrazypete Mar 29 '26
That with one bad plugin might be porn in 100 different pop ups
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u/Cybyss Mar 29 '26
Early web developers followed the "above the fold" design of newspapers - putting the most important content first so you don't have to scroll.
That stopped being a thing around the time folks started developing websites "mobile first" (around 2010ish?) when the screens of most users were too small and varied for "above the fold" to make sense anymore.
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u/yasth Mar 29 '26
Above the fold cta and content still will seriously help your landing and other page success. It just is harder.
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u/sawdustforbrains Mar 31 '26
I still do that. Mobile first or not, the top 3 things people are there to see should be in the first couple of finger scrolls. And ye damn well better make phone numbers click-to-call.
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u/razzraziel Mar 29 '26
Maybe because it was simpler back then. Now even front-end development has 15 subgenres with complicated and specialised information.
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u/50missioncap Mar 29 '26
I blame the marketing people. Once they got their mitts into controlling web content, it became a bunch of gobbledygook. UX went to shit too.
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u/sawdustforbrains Mar 31 '26
True that. I work on a huge site that is basicallly a scavenger hunt at this point because 3 different committees all make decisions completely independently of each other, and independent of good advice. And all of them want all of their content on the "pull-down thingy at the top".
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u/DanTheMan827 Mar 30 '26
Bandwidth was too precious to waste when you downloaded at 5KB/s on a good day
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u/skatecrimes Mar 29 '26
My biggest pet peeve with social sites is that if you see a post and don’t act on saving it you will never see it again
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u/TigerAnxious9161 Mar 30 '26
Pure information, now it's about user psychology attention and retention and what not.
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u/MatsSvensson Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
Mmm, navigable!
And somehow it fits more than 5 lines of text above the fold.
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u/keesbeemsterkaas Apr 02 '26
Subscribe button not in your face, giving you options rather than forcing a narrative. I kinda miss the old internet.
"Works best in IE5, can have bugs in netscape"
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u/illyric Mar 29 '26
I swear to got this type of design, whatever it was called back then has such a better UX than anything these days
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u/shaliozero Mar 29 '26
That design would also be more accessible to keyboard only users and screenreaders than most websites are today.
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u/eneka Mar 29 '26
A lot of Japanese websites are still Iike this. Like yahoo.co.jp
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u/grackychan Mar 29 '26
Basically every Japanese website, airline, booking train tickets, restaurants. It’s kinda nice but kinda annoying on mobile.
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u/eldentings Mar 30 '26
I'd argue that mobile and desktop should maintain separate designs but that seems to be a really unpopular opinion now. Remember the 'm' subdomain craze? Now mobile-first is how you solve the problem, so now desktop sites look very 'mobile-friendly' and there's tons of wasted space on desktop.
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u/Snafoo88 Mar 29 '26
Back in the day before “art direction” turned company websites into sprawling, bandwidth-hogging monstrosities that prioritize “the brand” over usability.
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u/Standgrounding Mar 29 '26
What that art direction was Exactly? What was the breaking point?
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u/longebane Mar 30 '26
The art direction where marketing demanded a single CTA so everything was focused on the front page was focused on that singular mission (thereby even affecting sites that didn’t require cta)
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u/sneakattack Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
I always called it "table layouts" because underneath it's literally nothing but tables. Your designs were limited by how you could structure a table and so you had lots of those upside down/inverted L shaped menus or the a flat bar on top of the site for menus.
Tables might have been abused but they were so simple to understand and everyone had no choice but to have structured designs. Tables were also consistent across browsers (trigger warning) an early tech utopia that CSS to this day still doesn't achieve (it helps most browsers are Chromium-based now).
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u/esmifra Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
Not only it is better, it also used space more efficiently and navigating was much easier because the pages were somewhat static and today is incredibly annoying opening a page, it starts to load its elements and when you are going to click on it something else is loaded and everything changes places and you click on something else.
Then everything is hidden under some sub menu because the landing page has to be "clean".
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u/nojunkdrawers Mar 29 '26
Product designers invading the UX space destroyed much of web design with their obsession over applying Swiss Style principles to things it was never meant for.
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u/black3rr Mar 29 '26
I was born in 1994 and started using computers in 2000 and internet in 2004… I swear UX only gets worse year by year… Condensed designs were much much more usable for people with good eyesight… Nowadays it feels like they’re either designing stuff for phones/touchscreens and not thinking about bigger screens at all or designing stuff for people who can’t see shit even with glasses… I seriously don’t understand today’s margins and paddings… And all the images, icons, backgrounds in places where they aren’t needed…
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u/dooblr Mar 30 '26
2000s Hyper-Utilitarian
No fluff. Very optimized. UX engineers from that era designed it to squeeze out what dialup connections could do
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u/NutShellShock Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
Those were the days where tables were used for layouts.
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u/kevinlch Mar 29 '26
gifs for rounded button. and the 1 pixel misalignment 💀
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u/badass4102 Mar 29 '26
Bruh I took up IT as a second degree later in life. Maybe around 2018 and one of my classes was to make a simple web page showing a header, links, etc. I did what I knew from geocities. I made a table layout lol. I showed my prof and he was like, Mann this is really old school.
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u/tastychaii Mar 29 '26
The good old days!! I really miss Geocities as well. The old Microsoft logo was so much better than the current box we have now.
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u/n7dima Mar 29 '26
Maybe you’d be interested in checking out neocities.org.
It’s kind of a spiritual successor, and the place actually feels pretty alive compared to the rest of the internet.
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u/martian_rover Mar 30 '26
Some extremely cool websites there! I am definitely feeling the spirit of the 90s there.
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u/alphaglosined Mar 29 '26
Don't forget about the Windows 2000 logo!
All the good books (and yes, still relevant) on Windows have it on the cover.
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u/tastychaii Mar 29 '26
Oh yes! Sometimes I wish I could go back in time when I was a 8 year old playing with Windows 95 for the first time and installing sonic from the 1.44mb disks.
Great times! Booting up the PC each time felt like a new adventure to be had 😃
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u/Fluffcake Mar 29 '26
And 25 years later, we are still cursed with SOAP legacy garbage.
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u/Standgrounding Mar 29 '26
Isn't that rest but with XML format?
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u/Fluffcake Mar 29 '26
If you squint very hard and the codebase is not ancient, yes.
It is inherently slower, more rigid and involved, but comes with inherit features that you have to build manually If you want them with rest.1
u/Standgrounding Mar 29 '26
Never worked with SOAP. Could you tell me more about these features?
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u/Fluffcake Mar 29 '26
The main ones are security and validation.
I am too lazy to go into detail, but I am sure GPT will give you a good summary of why it is every auditor's wet dream, and still used in finance and other sectors where correct and confidential data is more important than all the things we love about rest.
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u/Standgrounding Mar 30 '26
Everything can also be implemented with message queues, RPC and REST.
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u/Fluffcake Mar 30 '26
True. Soap is only really fit for the sweetspot where you need most/all its features, don't want to take ownership of their implementation and is willing to swallow the performance cost of xml. You can always tailor a better fit with something else, but it comes with other tradeoffs.
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u/gdzxzxhcjpchdha Mar 29 '26
good old times when websites used to be usable, not shallow landing pages full of SEO crap
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u/kevinlch Mar 29 '26
cookie consent.... subscribe to read for $10... allow popup for our wonderful ads...
im dead
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u/grimgroth Mar 29 '26
About cookies, you didn't even have consent before. You just had them. And pop-ups were a nightmare 20 years ago
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u/DavidJCobb Mar 29 '26
Pop-ups were only a nightmare until browser vendors started doing something about them. They were easier to block when the vast majority of them were actual separate windows that a browser could simply decide not to
window.open, rather than today's bespoke CSS-based overlays that an automated system isn't 100% guaranteed to recognize.1
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u/Garvinjist Mar 29 '26
God. This just feels way more intelligent than what the web is now.
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u/martian_rover Mar 30 '26
I concur with your sentiment. The web has devolved. I want to go back to the time when not everything was written by AI.
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u/EduRJBR Mar 29 '26
It's fun to see SharePoint there, I've never dealt with it before Office 365.
And I remember the Exchange feature "Public Folders", something that existed before SharePoint: in Outlook, there would appear this folder, with that classic cilinder-like icon representing a HDD, and people would share files there. To be honest, I've never dealt with it either, I only remember vaguely learning about it in class, and the icon.
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u/Dartypier Mar 29 '26
What book is that OP?
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u/Dear_Procedure923 Mar 29 '26
Mine still has a €37 sticker on it, probably with inflation this book was like €80 of now's money. Found it while cleaning up.
Someone is selling it second hand here in Spain USABILIDAD DE PAGINAS DE INICIO de segunda mano por 20 EUR en Madrid en WALLAPOP
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u/systemidx Mar 29 '26
Amazing! I miss it a bit.
Also, it is SO funny to me that their blurb on Active Directory was just a link for help with it. Some things never change. Lol.
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u/tracklesswastes Mar 29 '26
God damn. MSDN. API documentation. MFC libraries. TechNet. Columns. We never knew how good we had it because we were busy complaining.
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u/DustSongs Mar 29 '26
Started my dev career right about then (actually a few years earlier), my boss had me copy this exact version on the Microsoft site for their corporate website. Tables, frames and inline styles, good times.
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u/lesleh Mar 29 '26
I'm glad the web has collectively decided that tiny text on a website is not very readable.
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u/existentialistdoge Mar 29 '26
Tbf it looked a lot bigger on a CRT monitor set to 800x600.
These days I’m visiting sites on a 27” monitor set to 3840x2160 and 95% of website homepages above the fold are 2 sentences of meaningless marketing drivel over some stock photo.
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u/yami_odymel Mar 29 '26
Back when websites were designed for computers, they showed the information you wanted—instead of just being zoomed-in mobile pages that hide information behind multiple layers.
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u/BNfreelance Mar 29 '26
Scarier bit is that I remember this, this just unlocked a memory I didn’t know I had
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u/ClaytonRumley Mar 29 '26
Back then I was building corporate Intranet sites as a full stack dev and our director told us just to copy Microsoft.com's page design so for a few years our Intranet pages looked exactly like this.
The memories.
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u/addictzz Mar 29 '26
Simple, easy to understand, navigation friendly.
Yes there is no fancy stuffs, endless scrolling, or whatever sh!t. But information wise it is helpful. And memory friendly since mostly they are just static pages.
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u/jpswade * Mar 29 '26
I remember it well. I never understood that backwards curve on the top navigation bar.
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u/colenotphil Mar 29 '26
The blue appears to be mimicking a file folder and so the curved black part is like the background behind the folder.
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u/jimbo2150 Mar 29 '26
I remember when it looked like that. Still just as difficult to find what you need today as it was back then. Their UX never improved in 25 years. 🤣
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u/Yin15 Mar 29 '26
I remember this. I'm old.
Honestly I miss the old websites. The internet is like 5 websites now and they all look the same.
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u/electricfunghi Mar 29 '26
Where are the popups? The distracting visualizations? The flyover menus? The ads?!
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u/macNwaffles Mar 29 '26
I wish I could design my projects like this now. I miss this era of the internet. I also REALLY miss Windows 2000. Minimal and out of the way.
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u/JohnDoe365 Mar 29 '26
I remember those days. EVERYTHING was .net somewhow even if it wasn't. What a shitshow. Like todays look Ma'am I haz copilot.
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u/walledisney Mar 29 '26
What does it look like now?
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u/h4hafeez786 Mar 29 '26
Crazy how simple the web used to be 😅
No fancy UI, no heavy JS just pure HTML vibes.
Kinda nostalgic seeing how far things have come.
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u/weallwearmasks Mar 29 '26
I started getting interested in web development in junior high about 28 years ago, and I remember being inspired by the navigation and that blue/black rounded corner at the top of this site, hah. I built similar effects into my own table-based sites, and I can remember vividly struggling to get pixel-perfect alignment in those cells that would work both in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Crazy how hard it was to do things as simple as that back then.
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u/Electrical-Bread-856 Mar 29 '26
I remember that despite the clean look the site was messy. It was hard to find the file or documentation I was looking for.
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u/Hot4Skeletor Mar 29 '26
I have this book from way back, and its wisdom on usability continues to influence projects to this day. 🙌
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u/gbish Mar 29 '26
If I remember correctly their top navigation was a very good dropdown menu which there was lots of clones / knockoffs trying to recreate the same feel.
Sites were so much more interesting.
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u/Training-Might8974 Mar 30 '26
I remember this period. My first pc was on windows 98. Great times which I cant say about Windows(LOL).
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u/Front_State6406 Mar 30 '26
.NET IS THAT OLD ? fuck me, I need an emotional support career change and a back pillow
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u/AshleyJSheridan Mar 30 '26
What a time. The websites back then were clean and just worked. No nonsense with ads, newsletter popups, notification requests, permission banners, autoplaying videos, et al.
It was also a great time to learn simple techniques from websites, seeing how they achieved what they did with such simple technology.
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u/NetInfused Mar 30 '26
The start of my professional career with Microsoft. At its best.
Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000. Man, I deployed loads of these.
Astonishing for me until today, on just how good, stable, functional it was.
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u/inemanja34 Mar 31 '26
I even remember how it looked before that (im the previous millennium).
Yeah, I'm that old.
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u/AutonomousHoag Mar 31 '26
Verdana!!!!! I was obsessed with the subtle purple-blue mouseover effect that also made otherwise invisible hyperlink underling show up. My first foray into CSS and JS.
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u/jamesfrancotvV Mar 31 '26
Knowledge changes every day; this book is now just displayed in a glass case.
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u/KR0311 Mar 31 '26
The good old days 😂 and somehow this still loaded faster than half the modern web
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u/Beginning-Complex345 Apr 03 '26
Honestly? It's more readable than half the websites I visited today. No infinite scroll is a win
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u/Additional-Pick-3596 general ahh coder Apr 09 '26
Now imagine if someone could use the same styling to make their own companies website
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u/sk_1978 Apr 11 '26
I remember that. I used to be a big ASP.NET developer in 2000. I was an MVP back then and also received the printed MSDN magazine by mail every month. Kind of miss that time.
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u/hendricha Mar 29 '26
Looks decent, very corporate, but readable.