Oh, the 90′s. The internet was beginning to catch on with the introduction of AOL, and web design was at it’s infancy. Many websites had some annoying features we are glad have died out, such as scrolling text, customized scrollbars and much more. Below we review the top five worst web design trends and why we are glad they have died out.


1. Input Text Fields
Before Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and all the other social networking sites, people had personal homepages. 99.9% of them looked like crap, had 2 visitors, and no interesting information. A lot of these sites asked you to input your name when you first visit, and then it would display your name on the page. This was useless, annoying, and a waste of time. Also, it was a good reason to leave that page. These never served any real purpose, and people eventually caught on and stopped using them.

2. Animated GIFs
At one point in time people actually thought it was good to put up images of spinning globes, dancing babies, and e-mail us icons with blinking text. These never looked good. The worst part is business websites actually used these. 99% of the time these images were unrelated to anything on the site. Why people thought these were a good idea is still unknown to me. If you look hard enough you will still find websites that use these.

3. Background MIDI Music
Before YouTube and Napster you could find a lot of MIDI music on the web.  These were not the real songs but computer-generated knock-offs that sounded like they were created on a $10 keyboard. There are probably about three people in the history of the world that actually enjoyed listening to these things. But that didn’t stop thousands of website owners from putting this crap on their websites. The music would start when the page loaded, and often times the player controls were hidden so there was nothing to do to stop this horrid excuse for music besides leave the page, and that’s exactly what most people did. This trend isn’t exactly dead, as now people load up multiple videos or music players with auto-start, or 25 megabyte wave files.

4. Frames
People used to use frames because… well I don’t know why. Sometimes you would see a page with the logo in one frame, navigation in another, content in a third and a copyright message in the footer frame… and every frame had scrollbars. Frames aren’t completely dead yet, but HTML5 is working to kill them.

5. Scrolling Marquees
Scrolling marquees were a great way to make a user wait 10 minutes to read two sentences. I guess the reasoning behind using them is making the text stand out from the rest of the page. It did work… sorta. The user would see the text, start reading it, get annoyed and give up. Luckily this trend died out quickly… but not quick enough.

So what web design trends from the 90′s do you not miss? What sites still use outdated 90′s web design tactics? Comment below.

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