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Mid-90s Web Page Designs

As noted in previous pages listed before this, it was hard to find much information on anime in general. In the past, fan websites for Sailor Moon ran rampant back when computer screens had a resolution of 800px x 600px, the internet provider was dial-up and the world wide web was only known by geeks and people using it for their work. That isn't to say they had a lot of content, however.

Often you would find a handful of pictures and at best small summaries of the series and statistic pages on them. More interesting pages were usually media pages that were either filled with Real Audio sound bytes, small Real Video animation clips, midi files or image galleries. All the while, their designs followed similar design trends. Over the years I've noticed trends come and go; with them, so have many fan websites.

Though compared to today's standards those websites from the early to mid1990s would be considered poorly made and uninteresting, they were what I had as a young child and they enthralled me. Prone to bouts of nostalgia, I like to try to find those old websites using "The WayBack Machine", but many of the ones I loved are not found or are missing so many key components they are barely recognizable. Still, seeing the results of other web pages that lurked about remind me of all the silly fads for websites back then. They are very corny, yet nostalgic. Many of the web pages had the following:

Free Web Page Hosting

Aol
Angelfire
Geocities
Simplenet
Tripod
Xoom

These web hosting sites were where most fan websites were under. They were free and good start up sites for web mastering newbies. All in all, they provided a good way for people to express themselves. It was just a shame they had to advertise themselves everywhere with pop-up windows.

Neon Text

Most people used colors you'd expect in a rainbow. They would be bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue and bright violet. Some would used the standard black or white. Now, depending on the background color they chose, some of the text clashed terribly and hurt your eyes when reading. To spare your eyes the abuse, you would often highlight every word with your mouse and then read it.

Tiled Wallpapers

Some people wanted more than a neon or black and white background and thus used tiled backgrounds. They could range from any size and were set on default, automatically tiling them. Some were seamless. Others were just obviously images that repeated over and over. If they played it smart, they would lighten, darken or fog the background so text (often in a good contrast color) could be read easily. If they weren't smart about it, the visitors would have to do the same "highlight-the-entire-text" game to read the information provided.

Bullets

To add some pizzazz to one's page, people liked to use image bullets. They were not the simple bullets you'd generate from HTML code, though. They were graphics. They would range from simple colored circles to other shapes. Some would even use tiny images. The weird thing was, I'd see bullets used outside of making lists. Also, back then, if you had too many different image bullets, some of them wouldn't load.

Image Separation Bars

Web pages in the past often fit everything they could on one page. To separate things they used separation bars. Like bullets, they were not the simple lines you inserted with a little HTML code, but actually pictures. Half the time they were often thick and decorated to make the web page look more interesting.

Image Buttons

"Buttons" were another favorite. They were often about 100px x 40px to 200px x 74px and were usually located at the top and/or bottom of the page for navigation. Home, Back, Next and Email were what they were mainly used for.

Link Banners

When making a link page you didn't simply use text links in a nice listed row, a clique box or tiny banners. No, you used banners that often ranged from 350px x 50px to 600px x 100px on a 800px x 600px screen!

Dreambooks

They were basically guest books and a quick way to tell the webmaster "I have been here!" Other than email, visitors of the site communicated using those. It was also a way to get your site some publicity if you so had one.

Webrings

Another way to promote your site and not have to make link pages full of banners was to start or join a webring that focused on a certain interest. Do you like Sailor Moon? There was a webring for that. Do you like a specific character? There was a webring for that. Often times there were multiple webrings for one topic of interest. If you had something you liked, you could make a webring of it.

Awards

While these are still around today, a lot of them are still the ones from "way back when." Many website owners would create virtual certificates that were "awards." They would then give these awards to other websites they approved of for whatever reason. People would gather these awards and place them on their very own page - a trophy room per say. It was another form of advertising one's website, but "cleverly" disguised as a reward.

Midi Files

Midi files... they were small music files that resembled elevator music. They were all the rage and many websites would have them automatically playing as background music. Fortunately, or unfortunately, back then if you wished to listen to music you used a portable cassette player or a disc-man if you wanted to listen to music beyond a radio.

Often you didn't play music while on the computer and if you did, the sound files you had were likely midis anyway. Nevertheless, if you were indeed playing music, watch out Sometimes the website you were visiting had their midi background music cranked up loud and you'd get a shock to the eardrums.

Winamp

Winamp was the media player at the time. You played everything on that. (Though sometimes you would use Realplayer or Quicktime if it couldn't play something.) It was small, easy to use and you could decorated it with many "skins." Winamp skins were basically similar to virtual cases you'd stick on your MP3 players today. Some Sailor Moon websites would provide Sailor Moon-themed skins you could download and apply to your music player.

Full-Sized Images

Pages would often have full sized images posted throughout their pages. These would take some time to load and often took up space. To some degree they would act similar to image separation bars because people would stick them smack center in their page in between paragraphs.

You had to watch out for image galleries. Some people played it smart and made thumbnails or simple text links that describe the picture. Those who were either lazy or didn't know how to make proper links simply put them up in their full-sized glory and often the page wouldn't be able to load all the images because the Internet connection was dial-up. Hello, refresh button.

Animated Gifs

Another way to make your web page more visually interesting was by using animated gifs. Fortunately they tended to be smaller than the full-sized images and loaded fairly quickly... unless of course they absolutely littered the page.

Java Lake Applets

Basically you could take a picture and with the use of java script you could add a rippling water effect that reflected said image. They made pages take a while to load, but because it was more interesting than an animated gif, people loved to use them.

Additional Stuff

There were certain things you'd often find on Sailor Moon web pages in the 1990s that you don't see often today. These are some examples:

Moonie Code

I never understood Moonie Code in truth. Basically it was a way to "quickly" inform other fans about how much you knew about the series, what you really liked about Sailor Moon and how much you knew. I never paid much attention to it, however. It was too complicated for my liking, because you often had to decode them manually.

YOU KNOW YOU WATCH TOO MUCH SAILORMOON WHEN Lists

I have no idea who started this, but almost every Sailor Moon web page that was not a media-related website had one of these lists. The numbers became ridiculous and you had to be either very bored to read all of them, or the author of the list was really funny and added in some creative if not ludicrous examples.

Anti-Shrines

I don't see these so much today and those I do see were ones that have stayed up since the 90s. You had fan shrines and you had hate shrines. Most of these hate shrines were aimed at "Raye", "Rini" or Sailor Moon in general. I theorize it was mainly due to the Dub, because really... when you watch DiC's adaptation of the anime when you are older... almost everyone is a jerk.

As a child one would automatically see Raye as a jerk because she made Serena cry so easily. Rini was a jerk because she was a brat who caused Serena a lot of problems. Darien was a jerk because he teased Serena... It is later on, when you are older, do you realize... Serena was the most selfish, gluttonous and lazy person in the DiC adaptation. Really. Ah, childhood ignorance.