Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998

bebna 13 years ago |

The best thing about old site designs is for me their small footprint. The whole payload of viaweb is 62.5kb, a nice size for fitting in the 64kbps of ISDN.

Why do I think this is relevant today? In many countries like Germany for example it is common to have a mobile traffic upper limit around between 200mb and 512mb per month. After that you only get GPRS. Use your smartphone for a week with only 2G (53.6kbps), to get a feeling what many smartphone users here think about it: "It is better to have a Wifi ap in reach."

Yaggo 13 years ago | |

The irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.

untog 13 years ago | | |

Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.

Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and depending on what market you're in it could be important. But for most people it isn't.

gdubs 13 years ago | | |

It's actually important in two major ways. First, conversion rates have been known to increase in correlation with site speed [1]. Second, mobile devices are often on terrible connections.

1: http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load...

rhizome 13 years ago | | |

I believe it has something to do with importing the 20 analytics dependencies required to appear SRS BSNS.

mayank 13 years ago | |

Hate to be pedantic, but "kbps" is actually kiloBITS per second, and including packet headers, it would take closer to 10 seconds on an ISDN line.

jere 13 years ago |

I'm surprised by how good the copy is.

>Viaweb Store is the fastest, easiest way to open an online store. You create your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to read this page. So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes.

"Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on shopify.com if you ask me.

soheilpro 13 years ago | |

Yeah! That's the first thing I noticed. I'm sure PG has written that.

themckman 13 years ago |

Honestly, other than the blocky buttons and bullets, that's a very pleasing site to look at, even by today's standards.

Yaggo 13 years ago | |

YMMV.

moheeb 13 years ago | | |

He just stated what his mileage was. Why would it vary?

Yaggo 13 years ago | | |

In English, "you" can be used to refer to people in general.

ghshephard 13 years ago |

"Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. If you wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to render display text as images."

Ironically - Apple still does this on apple.com. Most of their large nice looking text is actually an image.

pjungwir 13 years ago |

I remember Cybercash! They were no Stripe, to be sure, although I don't remember ever having problems with their functionality or reliability. I wonder what his issues were?

ananthrk 13 years ago |

Discussions from an year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071

asciimo 13 years ago |

Interesting Morris Worm connection! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

witek 13 years ago |

Is this in response to another Yahoo buyout today? ;]

yuchi 13 years ago |

The logo it's an animated gif. That's awesome. The only animated gif I ever seen on a web site that actually is stylish.

themckman 13 years ago | |

Took forever to animate for me. Had my face almost against my screen trying to see it change.

serichsen 13 years ago |

Continuous deployment! In your face, Agile! :)

lefinita 13 years ago |

sadly, the functionality not work anymore :(

apunic 13 years ago |

looks like a mobile site from 2010