May 1994

The San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, California tries a new system called the World Wide Web where graphics and text are both sent out over the Internet together.

1994

Government Web site from the Department of Energy. Simple graphics and big text were the rule.

1995

Bob Stepno, former editor at WRAL TV in Raleigh, N.C.,, calls this graphics-heavy screen the "happy valley" approach to Web Design. Each of the link areas was linked using what was then fairly complex server-side map code.

1996

A typical university Web page was a bulleting board with icons and labels. Note text links below for text-only browsers like Lynx. Also note that the page is gray, which was the early default color of the Web. While users could adjust their browsers to show blank pages as white, they usually forgot or didn't know how.

1997

Experiment in audio-video design. Blue underlined text brought up .aiff audio files. Clicking on the still frame brought up a Quicktime movie. Both audio and video files involved excessive waiting time for modem users who typically had 14.4 or 28.8 kbps modems at the time. .

1997

The New York Times staff was worried that a more dynamic Web page will look like something that was not the New York Times. Everything is frozen in place and mapped to links.

1997

The Miami Herald builds its pages around the <frame> structure, with the top and left frames (black background) controlling the content in the white middle and right side. The "section scan" (two big arrows under the H) did not catch on.

1998

The more fluid design of the Washington Post at this time is based on <table> tags. The text and graphics are much easier to change than the trapped in amber New York Times <map> style above but leave trapped white space and other design problems..

1998

BBC uses <table> tags and sends out .wav and .au audio files. Note that both right and left columns have ragged text on the outer edges to give an open feeling. Still, trapped white space and headline wraps are problems in the inner column.

1998

USA Today site is designed to look like the newspaper. This design used a 1-2-3 column designbuilt ardound <table> tags.