I remember the first website I ever built—back in 1998, it had a spinning skull GIF and a visitor counter, and I thought it was the most sophisticated thing on the internet.
The early web, what we now call Web 1.0, was a chaotic mess of personal expression and technical limitation. Between roughly 1991 and 2004, websites were static HTML pages that looked like they’d been assembled by enthusiastic amateurs (because they usually were). You’d see backgrounds tiled with tiny repeating images, text in every color imaginable, and those infamous “under construction” GIFs with animated workers digging endlessly. Navigation meant clicking blue underlined links, and if you wanted to update your site, you had to manually edit HTML files and re-upload them via FTP. The aesthetic was raw, unpolished, and—here’s the thing—kind of beautiful in its honesty. Sites like GeoCities and Angelfire gave millions of people their first taste of publishing to the world, even if that world had to wait 45 seconds for a single image to load on a 56k modem.
When Everything Started Moving and Breaking (The Web 2.0 Revolution That Changed How We Click)
Wait—maybe it wasn’t a revolution so much as an evolution, but either way, the mid-2000s transformed the internet from a library into a conversation. Web 2.0 brought us dynamic content, user-generated everything, and the realization that websites could actually respond to what you did. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter turned ordinary people into content creators, while technologies like AJAX meant pages could update without that jarring full-page refresh we’d all gotten used to. Design-wise, things got sleeker—gradients replaced tiled backgrounds, rounded corners became obsessive (I definately spent hours perfecting border-radius values), and suddenly everyone cared about something called “user experience.” CSS frameworks like Bootstrap emerged around 2011, letting developers build responsive sites that didn’t look completely broken on mobile devices.
Honestly, the shift to mobile-first design was probably the biggest upheaval since the web began. By 2015, more people were accessing the internet from phones than computers, and designers had to rethink everything.
The Tyranny of Flat Design and Minimalism (Or How We All Started Looking the Same)
Apple’s iOS 7 launch in 2013 killed skeuomorphism—those realistic textures that made digital buttons look like physical objects—and ushered in an era of flat design that some of us still haven’t recovered from. Every site suddenly featured vast white spaces, sans-serif fonts (usually Helvetica or Roboto), and hamburger menus that hid navigation behind three horizontal lines. Material Design from Google in 2014 added subtle shadows and motion, trying to recieve some sense of depth without reverting to the glossy buttons of the past. I used to think this minimalism was elegant, but turns out when everyone adopts the same aesthetic, the web starts feeling like an endless IKEA showroom—clean, functional, and vaguely depressing. The average website loading time dropped significantly though, from several seconds to under two, because all those heavy graphics and Flash animations disappeared (Flash finally died in 2020, and nobody mourned).
Where We Are Now and Where Nobody Knows We’re Going Next
Modern interfaces blend everything that came before while adding new complexity. Dark mode became standard after years of burning our retinas with white backgrounds. Microinteractions—those tiny animations when you hover or click—make sites feel alive without overwhelming users the way auto-playing videos and pop-ups once did (though, I guess those still exist too, unfortunately). AI-driven personalization means two people visiting the same site might see completely different layouts based on their behavior, which is either incredibly sophisticated or mildly creepy depending on your perspective. Progressive web apps blur the line between websites and native applications, and design systems like Figma’s have made collaboration so seamless that teams across continents can iterate on interfaces in real-time.
The tools changed too—we went from hand-coding HTML to WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver to content management systems like WordPress to no-code platforms like Webflow that let designers build complex sites without writing a single line of JavaScript. What took weeks in 2000 takes hours now, which means the barrier isn’t technical skill anymore but taste, accessibility awareness, and understanding how humans actually interact with screens. The web feels simultaneously more polished and more homogeneous than ever, which makes me wonder if we lost something in all that optimization.
Anyway, I still miss those spinning GIFs sometimes.
