: The "style" of an early to mid-90s website is basically a website without any style. It's plain to save on bandwidth as well as due to technical limitations of web standards (or lack thereof).

@Shanna517

The "style" of an early to mid-90s website is basically a website without any style. It's plain to save on bandwidth as well as due to technical limitations of web standards (or lack thereof). Take Amazon's original layout (1995):


It doesn't have to be gaudy and with tons of animated GIFs or under-construction signs (they were a common sight, but not on operational business websites).

Another good example would be pets.com (1998-2000), which won a lot of awards from the advertising industry for their website design. But I can't find a screenshot of it.

Anyway, even though most of it would be considered poor design these days, there are still both good and bad 90s web designs. For instance, a grey background is pretty "retro", as are a 256-color palettes, 90s clip-art-style web graphics, and Times New Roman type face. Frames are a good throwback as well, as are gopher links and hit counters. But things like midi background music, clashing day-glo colors, stock animated-GIFs, etc. are more characteristic of poor designs than 90s web design in general.

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