xlinux

Retro Web - What's old is new!

Have you noticed lately that "retro" is back in? If you need some examples, here's some real-world examples for you:

No, you didn't step back in time. These are the current real logos of Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Pepsi. While Pizza Hut seems to have done a bunch of CTRL+Z to undo everything, Burger King took the old logo and changed it up ever so slightly. Same thing with Pepsi. As these companies roll back the clock and realize what they had was pretty good, I think the Internet could learn a thing or two from these logos. First, we don't have to go back to the boring, "Web 1.0" era. Much like how Burger King and Pepsi took something old and made it new, yet familiar, we can do the same with the web.

Freedom of Expression

The "retro" web allowed for freedom of expression. For those of you who were on the Internet before 2010, I'm sure you remember all the wonderful designs we had. Sure, some of them looked like this site (I've never been a web designer!) but they were easy to look at, they loaded fast since there was no massive CSS and JavaScript files to load. Seriously, open up Firefox's web tools and hit refresh/reload on this page and watch how fast it loads.

Have you ever noticed how every website basically looks the same? That's because under the hood, it basically is. Chances are it is using the Bootstrap framework. This framework came from Twitter because they were tired of internal tools having different designs and basically looking like this website. Further, they wanted something that was "mobile first". While you can read this site on a mobile phone, I think it looks fine.

Building a Retro-Modern Web

Sadly, I think a lot of the tools that could be used to build this "retro-modern" web are gone. For example, rather than improving FrontPage for the modern web, Microsoft made the last version FrontPage 2003 (ironically, I'm using that version to build this website currently; even more ironic given that the name of this website is "xlinux".). All other tools that Microsoft created after FrontPage are all dead. Microsoft just doesn't want to empower people to build websites. When Office 2007 came along and it was clear that there wasn't going to be a FrontPage 2007, I switched to using (Macromedia, later Adobe) Dreamweaver since that is what was used in our high school web design class.

Much like how Burger King and Pepsi used old logos but gave them a modern twist, I believe this could be a guide for how FrontPage could be revamped. The HTML generated by FrontPage could be updated to handle modern HTML standards. Rather than using font tags, it could be expanded to do more with CSS. Take the navigation menu on this site. Those buttons are made with FrontPage. They could be "modernized" to use HTML and CSS rather than images and some old JavaScript.

Maybe this is stuff that Adobe Dreamweaver does, but the thing is that I don't think people want to buy into Creative Cloud. I know I don't. Heck, I've done what I can to get rid of using Photoshop. I've found other, free, tools that do a good job, if not better job. Dreamweaver of the past was great, but I don't think in its current form is as good as it once was.

So how do we build the "Retro-Modern" Web? Easy. Just do it. Reject boring AI site generators, break out NotePad, and do it.