June 30, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Web & E-Commerce
Before page builders, before responsive design was even a phrase anyone used, I built my first website by hand in Notepad, uploaded it via an FTP client I barely understood, and was prouder of it than almost anything I've built since. It was, and I say this with total confidence, terrible. Genuinely, gloriously terrible.
The Crimes Committed
Where to start. A tiled background image of stars that made any text on top of it nearly unreadable. A visitor counter widget, because apparently knowing I'd had 47 visitors mattered enormously to me at the time. An animated "under construction" GIF of a little man with a shovel, permanently digging, on a page that was never, ever going to be finished. And worst of all — a MIDI file that auto-played a tinny instrumental the second the page loaded, with no obvious way to turn it off, on a site about computer help, for an audience who almost certainly already had their speakers on.
Every table cell was a layout tool. Borders were everywhere because I'd just discovered I could add them. There was a font called Comic Sans involved, and I will not be taking questions on that.
Why I Still Think About It
It's easy to laugh at now, and I do, often. But that site taught me things that twenty-five years of better tools never quite replaced. I learned what HTML tags actually did because I had no choice but to write every single one by hand. I learned that "looks fine on my screen" means nothing once someone opens it on a different monitor — my stars background looked washed out on half the computers in our school library. And I learned, slowly and through trial and error, that a website's job is to serve the person reading it, not to show off everything the person who built it has just figured out how to do.
The Lesson That Still Applies Today
That last one is the big one, and it's the same conversation I have with clients constantly, just with 2026's version of the problem. Today it's not auto-playing MIDI files, it's auto-playing background video that eats someone's mobile data, animation that fights with the actual content, or a homepage so loaded with flashy interactive elements that the thing visitors actually came for — your phone number, your services, a clear next step — is buried three scrolls down.
The technology changes every few years. The temptation to build a website that impresses other web people instead of serving actual visitors hasn't changed at all. I see it most often with business owners who've been talked into a flashy template that looks incredible in a demo and then loads agonisingly slowly on an actual customer's actual phone, on actual rural NSW mobile data.
What I'd Tell That Kid in the School Library
Keep tinkering — that curiosity is the actual valuable part, and everything else gets better with time and better tools. But also: turn the MIDI file off. Nobody asked for it, and somewhere out there, someone's still trying to find the volume button twenty-five years later.
If you want to see genuinely embarrassing late-90s/early-2000s web design, the Wayback Machine is a wild and humbling place to spend an evening. Mine, mercifully, does not appear to have survived. Some mercies are real.