You have to admit that the website design capabilities of today are pretty darn cool and at the same time wonder how the internet ever survived with the websites that were created in the 90s. The awkward site layouts, cheesy special effects and sound clips, and clashing colours if used today would simply make the typical internet surfer bust a gut laughing.

Here are some of the most ridiculously silly tactics that were used for building websites in the 1990s . Please, refrain from laughing until the very end!

1. Bad Font/Background colour Combos

Back then the web design colour wheel had a few less spokes on it if you know what I mean, so the choices that were available for use were fairly limited when compared to what is available today.
It wasn’t uncommon for you to visit a website that had an awkward looking colour scheme which consisted of only two or three clashing colours. Red text on a green background, or what about a personal favourite of mine – purple text on a yellow background!

2. Iframes For Navigation Sidebars

Iframes were commonly used for navigation sidebars in order to allow the user to scroll down the page without ever losing the menu on the side. Were people really so lazy that they couldn’t simply click on the scroll bar on the right side of the screen and slide the page back up far enough to see the navigation menus?

Please note

: The Pictures below might not look all that great looking! You know why. We are talking about 1990′s web design trends today!

Here is how Mashable Might have looked like in 1990′s! Just a conversion of today’s screenshot from Mashable.com. Sometimes it’s fun to take a look back at the good old days and wonder what in the world were we thinking?!

3. Midi Sound Effects On Load

Did you ever forget to turn your computer speakers down and then visit a website that had midi sound effects built into it? Yikes! It was enough to startle you half to death! You certainly couldn’t call it music to your ears that’s for sure.
It was like being stuck in the middle of bad video game, you know, the really old ones that had a half a dozen sounds programmed into them. Worse still, you couldn’t switch them off so you either had to switch off your speakers or leave the page entirely. Not great for marketing!

4. Animated GIFs

One of the other mistakes that so called web developers made in the 90s was incorporating animated gifs into their websites. As if the pictures themselves didn’t look bad enough, now they had to have them grab your attention even more by making them move awkwardly around the screen? You wonder how people even bothered to stay on the internet long enough to get the information they were looking for when their senses were bombarded with all manner of dodgy animation – often several on the screen at one time.
Every so often you still come across an “old” web page that hasn’t been updated in a LONG time and animated GIFs are still there like they are a great idea. Time to hit the “back” button, methinks!

5. Visible hit counters

Really? As if you weren’t disappointed enough when you viewed your visitor stats on your own and realized your site sucked, now others could see how much your site sucked also by being able to view a visitor hit counter on your homepage.

Hit counters weren’t even accurate because all they did was increment whenever the page loaded. A user could simply click refresh a million times and your traffic hit counter reflected that.

Thankfully the website design techniques of the 1990s are long gone and we can now enjoy a higher calibre of online experience with gorgeous designs, seamless useability and at the very least, sound you can switch off!

About the Author: David Walker is an internet marketer who blogs about how to make money online, something he has done done successfully since March 2006. David wants to help as many people as possible do the same and you can access his “$100k Blogging Secret” training module for free at his blog.

Image Credit:  Rowan Marshall

Are you interested in 642-583 exam certification? Get our self paced SY0-201 & 70-640 practice questions and 1Y0-A18 study packages to pass your exam without any intricacy in ccie.