Back to basics: is Web 1.0 making a comeback?

Introduction and the yearning for Web 1.0

Is your website optimised for Netscape 2.0? Fifteen years ago that was a critical question in IT, but it's those early days of the internet that some yearn for. Back in the 1990s, chat rooms weren't global platforms demanding participation, and hosted no advertising. Websites were ugly, but simplistic. Distractions were few. Would you go back?

Are modern websites too demanding for some users?

"The capability of modern browsers to display complex websites can lead to the overuse of interactions and updating data," says Scott Byrnes-Fraser, Head of UX design at Adaptive Lab and formerly both Amazon's manager of UX design and a BBC creative director. He adds that while many modern sites are demanding for some users, many old sites were, too. The key is to test a website's usability.

"The focus on user-centred design practices – user testing, user research, and usage data analysis – is leading to many websites becoming less demanding on users," says Byrnes-Fraser. "I would argue that this is a step forward to a more responsive and adaptable web, rather than a reversal to the static Web 1.0."

Web 1.0: the read-only internet

For some, Web 1.0 is a distant memory of a different internet, one that relied on dial-up. For the younger generation, Web 1.0 doesn't mean anything. Was there a time before broadband? For them, a liking of Web 1.0 designs and ideas is a retro, avant-garde movement, not a return.

Loosely defined as the internet in 1996 when it had a global user base of just 45 million people across the globe, Web 1.0 was all about simple, read-only home pages. This was a time before online shopping and social media; chat rooms, web forms, directories and rudimentary banner adverts were all the rage. There was no Google – the arbiters of Web 1.0 were the search engine AltaVista, and Netscape, the dominant browser.

The next decade changed everything, with Web 2.0 evolving to deliver a more interactive experience to an awful lot more people – around a billion people were using the internet by 2006. Blogging, tagging, community websites, Wikipedia and the birth of Google all followed, and slowly led to the portable, personalised web we have today.

It's better-looking, location-aware, responsive to what device it's being viewed on, built around apps, fully optimised for search, and riddled with advertising. It's a whole lot more demanding and intrusive for its current three billion users than Web 1.0 ever was. Despite the advances, for some it's Web 1.0 that represents when the internet was at its best.

Is there a yearning for Web 1.0?

"Yes," says Richard Healy, co-founder of BaseKit, a web development platform that works with the likes of names.co.uk and 123.reg. "Markdown files and static site creation is on its way back – they're quick to create and easy to deploy. I've seen a lot more sites being deployed as Github pages." Healy thinks that static file creation makes sense for small sites that do not change much, such as instructional sites. "We spend a lot of our time worrying about databases, speed and deployment," says Healy. "Sometimes it just makes sense to go back to basics."

Web developers are obviously at the forefront of the penchant for Web 1.0, and there's a definite shift in how websites are being developed. "Lots of developers are raving about Jekyll at the moment," says Healy. "It's a simple static website generator that's easy to deploy … I think there will be more sites generated on this technology."

Some argue that Web 1.0 is still with us. "The majority of web is still web 1.0," says Byrnes-Fraser. "Most small businesses still use very static sites, albeit responsive static sites."

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Ello, Rooms and the search for simplicity

Contextual data: the modern web's joker

It's easy to confuse a desire for simplicity with a return to the old days before several important innovations changed our expectations of what the internet could do. The chief culprit here is the smartphone with GPS, a device that continues to define how the modern web is used – it's become completely mobile. With the creation of apps, there's an expectation that websites must be fast and responsive to all kinds of inputs – and especially geographic location.

"Web 1.0 was less complex, but also offered less contextual information," says Byrnes-Fraser. "Citymapper is more complex than any way-finding application of the old web, but is significantly more useful … people now expect the web to respond to their location, device, preferences and update dynamically." In that sense, the yearning for Web 1.0 only goes so deep.

Ello, and Facebook's Rooms app

Ello is a social media network built on the freemium model. Created in 2014 as a response to Facebook and Twitter, Ello doesn't feed data on retweets and 'likes' to advertisers. Its one million plus users also get a minimalist design that recalls the early days of the internet. "Ello saw an opportunity to design a clean user interface with a minimal feature set," says Byrnes-Fraser. "Making it ad-free is a nod towards some people's desire not to see ads."

If Ello could be considered a Web 1.0 fashion statement, so could Facebook's latest app, Rooms, an anonymous message board where people can connect with others all over the world. However, Byrnes-Fraser also argues that it's exactly the proliferation of user-data collected about people's online behaviour – and its analysis – that is behind a new desire for simpler, more tailored websites, and the birth of niche apps, that can all be mistaken for a revival of Web 1.0.

"Facebook must have seen specific use-cases in their current groups functionality that led to a decision to split-out a separate service," says Byrnes-Fraser. "Isolating use-cases of activities makes sense on complicated service," he adds. "Facebook did the same with its Messenger application."

Put simply, user data is allowing developers to identify specific kinds of users for the first time; all we're seeing now is new services being developed in response.

The problem with Web 1.0

Put down those rose-tinted spectacles – Web 1.0 was an impossible maze. "Things might have seemed simpler in the days of Web 1.0, but finding obscure content online was an uphill battle," says Mark Thomas, Managing Director of DeepCrawl, an auditor of website architecture. "Search is key to the modern day web experience, and search in 1.0 was virtually non-existent."

At the core of the modern web is the desire to create a simple user experience where search is effortless, but doing exactly that often relies on complex website structures. However, it's a two-way street. "This 'connecting' and 'sharing' has created a web that allows mass user collaboration, but has had the unintentional by-product of building an environment that can sometimes feel unnecessarily intrusive."

It may seem a lazy distinction, but the web can be divided into two main eras; pre-Google, and post-Google. Search was impossible, and now it's easy… too easy? "Web 2.0 has ushered in an age where we can reliably find obscure information, but we must deal with the reality that we ourselves are more susceptible to discovery," says Thomas. "Perhaps the desire to go backwards comes from a fear that we have shared too much of ourselves online, especially when using social networks and search engines."

The search for simplicity

There may be a growing demand for 'retro' web frameworks, but the yearning for Web 1.0 – for the 'quiet internet' – isn't really a movement. "Simplicity isn't a movement," says Byrnes-Fraser. "The web will evolve to adapt to people's understanding of it … as a user uses a service it will adapt to their level of understanding."

The desire for simplicity will never go away, thinks Thomas: "The challenge lies with web builders to balance the need for a more complex and connected web with the psychology of the humans who will use it."

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