New Layouts for the Web

In the early days of the Web, things were largely unknown. HTML was new, and it’s capabilities were minimal. The web browser was a new idea, not well understood. There were no preconceptions of what the web was supposed to be. All in all, It was a blank slate. Some might equate the 1990s with the wild west. I think a more appropriate comparison is the beginning of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 — when the apes touched the monolith … and everything changed.

The days of the early web were of exploration. People tried things. They took chances. There was no criteria to say the design was good or bad, right or wrong. People would create things, and share them. When they tried things, they would share what they learned about what worked for them. The web was a place of collaboration. This happened on their own sites. There were no central social networking sites. Those came later. People felt connected to their own website. There. The unique design they created, was a reflection of who they were. As browsers added features, people added them to their sites.

The web has changed a lot since then and not always for the best. While we have  better browser technology, faster rendering engines, and far better superior JavaScript support compared to back in the day, we’ve lost something along the way.  We’ve lost that sense of creativity of the early web. Web Design has become safe and boring. The majority of sites are using the same set of patterns. Don’t take my word for it. Far better people than I believe this is the case. Andy Clarke talks about how the web has lost it’s creative soul. Jen Simmons gives a talk about Modern Layout Ruts. She points out the many websites have a “blog shape”. She also provides in her talk, some ideas on how we can improve the situation.

I have a couple of ideas. The first is for people to create a sub-domain of their website, for the specific purpose of doing design experiments. Each experiment would ideally be a single page that represents a single concept. Think of it like CodePen, but hosted on your own site with simple HTML, CSS, and JS files. We get too wrapped up in frameworks and systems these days. The key to success with these experiments is to keep the code as simple as it can be, and to do them on your own site. The other idea, is to write about each experiment on their own website – to explain what you wanted to accomplish with a particular experiment. We need to share what we learned. If we do these two things, maybe we can make the Web fun again, get back some of what we lost.