alt Hacker NewsI prefer OG style websites – what are yours?
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/
Comments
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.
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/
This one has a special place in my heart https://www.tibia.com/news/
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
I keep my animation portfolio pretty minimal, albeit with some fun: https://joelcares.net/
I rescued the domain after it was left to expire and did my best to honour the original design from 2000.
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.
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
My last use case for it was selling a car and giving away some free stuff. Sadly, those have been replaced by fb marketplace.
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 :)
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.
Richard Stallman's site? Very OG.
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.
cybernetic culture research unit
I doubt it's currently maintained, but these esoteric sites are fun
Here are a couple others I know about:
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.
mine https://omarish.com
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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.