I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627255

by gorfian_robot • 4 months ago

31 48 4 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Whenever I discover a 'old' style website that is still actively maintained, I know I have found people who are prioritizing function over style. I ran across this beauty today when following a link on the Wikipedia. What OG style websites do you know about?

https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/

gorfian_robot2• 4 months ago

Here are a couple others I know about:

https://www.showcaves.com/english/index.html

https://www.hmdb.org/

omarish• 4 months ago

mine https://omarish.com

azangru• 4 months ago

Richard Stallman's site? Very OG.

https://stallman.org/

Although I see someone has put a 1.5MB image at the top, whose intrinsic size is 2000 × 2588 px, but which was downsized to 320 × 400 px. That's not prioritizing function.

harrisonpage• 4 months ago

https://isp.netscape.com

https://www.compuserve.com

http://www.catcam.com (not even https)

Yhippa2• 4 months ago

Your first link...I miss portals so much. Rip ig.

bryanhogan• 4 months ago

I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style. Modern UI design has its merits.

But yes, good designs are not flashy, e.g. I love the design of Astro Starlight ( https://starlight.astro.build/), a starter kit for documentation pages.

So I also took inspiration from "simple designs" for my personal site: https://bryanhogan.com/

Yhippa2• 4 months ago

I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style.

Why?

Esophagus4• 4 months ago

For one, it is awful on mobile.

We can have bare, simple sites while still making them accessible.

MajorBee• 4 months ago

I, for one, found reading the text under the News section quite difficult to read. The combination of the font color and the spacing/kerning made it all appear like a character soup to me. It's possible this is something that has variable impact across populations though.

Generally speaking though, I do think trying to paint 90s websites as some sort of utopian ideal of function and design is purely an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else. It is entirely possible to make fast, responsive, accessible, well-designed rich websites today, all without writing a word of JavaScript (not that including JS by itself is bad or anything). Do not mistake anti-user functions like heavy weight analytics and user tracking libraries, or poorly optimized and ill-architected code bundles as the current "state of the art".

aidenn0• 4 months ago

Having had access to the web from the mid '90s I find it weird to talk about "old" as if it were a unifying style. The accessibility for making a webpage meant that there was a cambrian explosion of different styles.

If by "old" you mean "minimally styled" then there are plenty of sites from that era that were really extravagantly styled, since it was a new medium that many people were exploring. There were also plenty of sites with Java or Flash that were considerably more intrusive than sites today (not to mention the period of time between when someone realized you open as many popups as you wanted and when popup-blocker plugins appeared).

Also, this is probably me getting old, but https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/ looks quite modern to me.

chneu• 4 months ago

I run a personal blog at https://chadneu.com that has a pretty unique look and feel. It's a wordpress blog with a terminal style theme.

lee_ars• 4 months ago

I still maintain the Chronicles of George, which went live in Feb 2001 and whose design has more or less stayed exactly the same ever since:

https://chroniclesofgeorge.com

I eventually added proper css, bolted on https, and updated the html to something a little more modern and standards-compliant, but the site is still hand-coded, and looks pretty much the same as it has for a quarter-century.

paddy_m• 4 months ago

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

https://www.vannattabros.com/dozer.html -- A detail page from the site, not well organized but so much great info about heavy equipment and logging.

xnx2• 4 months ago

Ha! Beat me to it with https://www.sheldonbrown.com/.

dravine• 4 months ago

The most OG style website I actively use on a regular basis is https://www.rockauto.com

It's fast to navigate and order parts from, works on every browser I've ever tried it in, and loads very fast because there's minimal unnecessary components to the entire site. I hope they never change it :)

jollyjerry2• 4 months ago

Love rockauto, in the same vein, but not used daily is https://www.mcmaster.com/

nice_byte• 4 months ago

http://pouet.net

https://www.unknowncheats.me/

ge96• 4 months ago

Where's that solar-powered website where the images are dithered

I guess it's this one https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Also like the style of Japanese websites where they seem broken/don't expand to fit available screen but cool aesthetic still

PhunkyPhil• 4 months ago

cybernetic culture research unit

http://www.ccru.net

I doubt it's currently maintained, but these esoteric sites are fun

gom_jabbar• 4 months ago

Related: 0rphan Drift Archive

https://www.orphandriftarchive.com

jollyjerry2• 4 months ago

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/

My last use case for it was selling a car and giving away some free stuff. Sadly, those have been replaced by fb marketplace.

al_borland2• 4 months ago

I still use Craigslist when I need to sell something. It’s not often, but I can’t bring myself to use FB marketplace. I don’t sell stuff often, but did sell a set of tires on CL a couple years ago.

ctippett• 4 months ago

https://www.cstrike.co.nz

I rescued the domain after it was left to expire and did my best to honour the original design from 2000.

joelcares• 4 months ago

I keep my animation portfolio pretty minimal, albeit with some fun: https://joelcares.net/

zygy• 4 months ago

the Japanese language school I went to which is indeed still updated: https://sokogakuen.org/

check out their directions page: https://sokogakuen.org/info.html

hmokiguess2• 4 months ago

This one has a special place in my heart https://www.tibia.com/news/

al_borland2• 4 months ago

The Cloudflare gate and large cookie warning with a multi-step opt-out kind of killed it for me before I could even give it a chance. It’s just an off putting welcome for a new user.

hmokiguess2• 4 months ago

yeah it's sad here's a webarchive version https://web.archive.org/web/20040701163325/http://www.tibia....

ronb1964• 4 months ago

Hacker News itself is a good example — no JavaScript bloat, loads instantly, works on anything. I also appreciate sites where you can actually find what you came for without dismissing three popups and a newsletter signup first. As someone who came late to the internet and learned a lot from straightforward, no-frills documentation sites, I have a soft spot for anything that just gets out of the way. With that being said, It ISN"T the most eye candy friendly site. But I guess that's exactly the attraction.

zadikian3• 4 months ago

Ever since my phone's wifi broke and I'm on 1 bar LTE at home, I've been using HN more. The site even looks good and modern imo.

rjrjrjrj2• 4 months ago

HN doesn't wrap properly on mobile, at least on mine (iPhone 15 Pro with base font size turned up a notch or two)

grishka• 4 months ago

Smithereen, my fediverse server software, replicates the old VKontakte desktop layout as faithfully as possible. Most functionality works without JS. Almost everything is rendered server-side. It does require a somewhat modern browser though. https://friends.grishka.me/grishka

zadikian3• 4 months ago

At least in 2014-2016, every important website you'd use as a student at Berkeley was old style. Starting with Telebears.

mFixman2• 4 months ago

The Cambridge list of talks at https://talks.cam.ac.uk is unbeaten.

The site loads in less than a second, you can do anything intuitively with a single click, all pages have a lot of useful information with zero fluff or clickbait.

gorfian_robot2• 3 months ago

uh oh!

"This version of Talks.cam will be replaced by 1 July 2026,"

mFixman2• 3 months ago

It was originally going to be scrapped by a Web 3.0 app-only proprietary events system, but we did a small campaign inside the university to keep the site on. As far as I know, the changes will now only be on the backend.

hayleox• 4 months ago

I like simple no-frills function-first websites, but I don't consider it a good thing when an old-style website has text running across the entire width of my 1440p monitor. It's just not pleasant to read, and given that the fix is often just two CSS rules (max-width:800px;margin:auto), I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for. You can still design your website like we're in the era of 800x600 displays, but please, take the tiny step to make it play nice with larger screens too.

Paul_Clayton• 4 months ago

I think one should use ex/em units when setting a maximum width for readability. People with poorer vision will tend to prefer a physically larger font size. Pixels can also vary in size for different displays. (I am not a web developer but I do have poor eyesight and delay getting new glasses.)

esbranson• 4 months ago

RSS (RDF Site Summary), released in 1999-2000.

Because I don't want to deal with formatting, I want to focus on data. Firefox and Safari formatting looked great.

rjrjrjrj2• 4 months ago

The site appears to have fallen over due to load. That is definitely OG.

vandyswa• 4 months ago

Here in the Seattle area ferry schedules can matter. I cooked up this webapp, 4.5k bytes to load the front page, another 1/2k per destination you query.

Web technologies call out to the minimalist in me, but I appear to be in the minority.

xnx2• 4 months ago

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

opengrass• 4 months ago

https://csszengarden.com

contre• 4 months ago

contre.io

dgeiser13• 4 months ago

John December's website, https://johndecember.com/

I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?

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