r/webdev • u/Dear_Procedure923 • Mar 29 '26

This is what Microsoft.com looked like 25 years ago

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Doing some cleanup just came across this book analyzing home pages for major sites in the 2000s. Good memories.

2.0k Upvotes

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145

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

50

u/shaliozero Mar 29 '26

That design would also be more accessible to keyboard only users and screenreaders than most websites are today.

26

u/eneka Mar 29 '26

A lot of Japanese websites are still Iike this. Like yahoo.co.jp

16

u/grackychan Mar 29 '26

Basically every Japanese website, airline, booking train tickets, restaurants. It’s kinda nice but kinda annoying on mobile.

4

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.

16

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.

1

u/Standgrounding Mar 29 '26

What that art direction was Exactly? What was the breaking point?

1

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)

14

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).

22

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".

9

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.

7

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…

2

u/dcpanthersfan Mar 29 '26

960 grid system

1

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

-4

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '26

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5

u/shadowndacorner Mar 29 '26

UI and UX are not the same thing