There is a category of web design I have been thinking about for years and have never quite known how to name. It is not the design of any single site, but the visual language that emerged across the small networks of personal pages — the webrings, the link-roll subcultures, the loose federations of journals that linked to one another and rarely to anyone else. For the five or six years bracketing the turn of the century, these networks produced a coherent and underexamined visual culture.
I want to call it webring aesthetics, with the caveat that not every site I have in mind belonged to a formal ring. The term is meant to capture something looser: the way a few hundred small sites, written and designed by amateurs, came to share a vocabulary of conventions without any central authority producing them 1.
What the conventions were
The conventions are easy enough to list. A single column of text, sometimes constrained by a table, set in the browser default at roughly 12-point. A tiled background — most often a low-contrast texture: marbled paper, parchment, a tessellated repeat of small flowers. A header image, hand-drawn or composed in Photoshop 5. A small block of personal navigation in the upper-left corner, usually a list of about four to eight links: About, Words, Pictures, Links, sometimes Sign My Guestbook. A webring widget at the foot of the page, with the ring name in a small image and arrows pointing to the previous and next sites.
None of these were enforced. They emerged because the people building these sites were reading each other's source code. To make a webpage in 1998 was to do so by looking over someone else's shoulder. The conventions were learned the way folk songs are learned — by listening, copying, and gradually drifting.
The webring was a piece of infrastructure that quietly enforced a kind of scale: it kept communities small enough to be legible, and bound them together loosely enough that the people inside them retained creative control of their own pages.
What the conventions were doing
Each of these conventions did something specific. The tiled background was, in practical terms, a way to suggest visual texture on a slow connection: a small image file would download once and tile across the whole viewport. But it also did expressive work. The choice of tile said something about the maker — a marbled paper for the bookish, a starfield for the dreamy, a tiled photograph of a forest for the outdoorsy.
The single column of text was, more than anything, a constraint imposed by ignorance of CSS. But it produced, by accident, what is still the most sustainable reading layout on the web. Readers who came to webring sites in the late nineties had been trained on books, not on multi-column newspaper layouts, and they read these pages slowly. The pages were written for that reading.
A digression on guestbooks
The guestbook, which I will write more about in another post, was the most social piece of software on the early personal web, and it has no real analogue now. It was strange in the way an inn's visitor book is strange — a public ledger of mostly anonymous strangers, who wrote one paragraph each and rarely returned. I have read thousands of these entries while building this archive. They are uniformly bland and uniformly moving.
What replaced them
The webring did not die in any dramatic way. It simply stopped being the way people found each other on the web. By 2003 most personal sites were either dormant or had been absorbed into LiveJournal, Blogger, or a handful of similar platforms. The conventions of webring design — the tiled background, the small header, the link block — were inherited by the early skinning culture of those platforms, where users could still impose them on their pages. By 2008 even that was gone.
What replaced them was a design culture optimised for algorithmic recommendation, in which the page must arrest the attention of a passing scroller. The page is no longer the destination; it is the bait. The webring page was the opposite. It was designed under the assumption that the reader had already arrived, and would stay 2.
What we might do with them now
I think there is a category of website worth making again whose proportions are closer to the webring page than to the contemporary algorithmic feed. Not as nostalgia — the marbled background is not coming back, and should not — but as an inheritance of a few specific instincts: the single column, the slow rhythm, the assumption of a reader who has chosen to be here.
This site is one attempt at that. There are others, and I have linked to them in the colophon.
- The webring as a piece of infrastructure dates from Sage Weil's implementation in 1995. By 1998 there were tens of thousands of rings. I will write about the technical history in a separate post. ↩
- One can argue this distinction too strongly — webring pages did, after all, have visitor counters, and visitor counters are a metric. But the metric was for the maker, not the algorithm. ↩