The Web Was Better In 2001. Fight Me.

Okay. We admit it. Headline is a little hot. We’re not here to actually argue that the modern web is a disaster. We like fast sites. We like real responsive design. We like being able to buy anything in six seconds. We like TLS. We even, grudgingly, like React.

But we started doing this in 2003, which means we remember the tail end of what the web was like before everything got consolidated and templated and optimized to within an inch of its life. And we miss some of it. Enough of it that we’re going to spend the next few paragraphs defending the honor of a web that mostly doesn’t exist anymore.

What the 2001 web actually looked like

For anyone who wasn’t there, a quick refresher.

In 2001, most websites were made by hand, by one person, in a text editor. There was no WordPress. There was no Squarespace. There was no “drag the hero component into the slot.” If you wanted a website, you learned HTML, you opened Notepad or BBEdit, and you typed. Images were optimized by hand. Layouts were done with tables, god help us. Fonts were whatever the user had installed. Nothing was responsive because there wasn’t anything to be responsive to. If you were on a phone looking at the internet, you were on a WAP site that showed you three lines of text at a time.

It was janky. It was broken. It looked different in every browser. Half the sites you tried to load were down because somebody’s server was literally a desktop computer under their bed.

And it was great.

What made it great

The 2001 web was great because it was made by weirdos. Everybody on it was making it on purpose. There was no “I need a website” button. If a website existed, it was because somebody wanted it to exist badly enough to teach themselves HTML. That filter did an enormous amount of work.

Fan sites for obscure bands. Shrines to specific episodes of specific TV shows. Someone’s extremely detailed personal taxonomy of their rock collection. Niche hobby forums with 40 members who had been talking to each other for years. The guy who ran the comprehensive catalog of every lighthouse in Maine. The lady with the exhaustive history of her town’s volunteer fire department. Pages that existed for no commercial reason whatsoever, because the person who made them cared about the subject so much that they felt compelled to make a website about it.

Everything was slower. Everything was harder to find. But everything you did find felt like it was made by a person. Because it was.

What we lost

Here’s what we lost when the web got easier.

We lost texture. Every modern website is built from the same 15 components, dropped into the same 4 layouts, hosted on the same 3 platforms, with the same stock photos of racially diverse people pointing at laptops. Not because any one person decided to make the web this way. Because when you make something easy, everyone makes the same version of it. A Squarespace site is a Squarespace site. There is only so much personality you can put into picking fonts from the same drop-down menu everyone else is using.

We lost weirdness. The 2001 web had the capacity for genuine strangeness because the barrier to entry was high enough that only the committed got through. The modern web’s barrier is so low that almost nobody takes the time to make something strange. Why would you. The platform you’re using has an opinion about what a good site looks like, and the opinion is probably right, so you just do what it suggests. And then it looks like everyone else.

We lost the long tail. The strange personal sites that defined the early web mostly aren’t being made anymore, because the people who would have made them in 2001 are posting on Instagram or TikTok or Substack instead. Those platforms are fine. We use them. But they are not the same thing as having your own weird website. On your own domain. Where you own the pixels. Where you can do whatever you want.

We lost ownership. In 2001, if you had a website, it was yours. The HTML was in a folder on your computer. The server was yours. The URL was yours. If a platform disappeared, your site did not disappear with it. Compare that to today, where most people’s “online presence” is a stack of accounts on services they don’t own, could be banned from at any time, and whose algorithms decide who sees their work. That’s not quite the same thing.

We lost patience. The 2001 web was slow. You waited for pages to load. You waited for images to download line by line. You read a thing all the way through because clicking to another thing took effort. The attention span the modern web demands and rewards is specifically the kind of attention span that destroys the thing we used to go online for in the first place, which was depth.

What we didn’t lose

We should be fair.

We didn’t lose the ability to make weird personal websites. That’s still totally possible. You can register a domain for twelve dollars and point it at a cheap host and build whatever you want. The tools are better. The hosting is cheaper. In theory, the 2001 web is still available to anybody who wants to make it. The problem is that fewer people want to, because the social reward for making a weird personal site is way lower than it used to be. You’re not getting featured on anybody’s blogroll. You’re not getting linked from somebody’s webring. You’re not getting discovered by someone surfing from site to site. The infrastructure of discovery that made weird personal sites feel worth making mostly got replaced by algorithmic feeds.

That’s a real loss. But it’s not a technical loss. It’s a cultural one.

What we try to do about it

We’re a web studio. We mostly build sites for organizations, which almost by definition means we’re building the kind of professional, consistent, well-functioning sites the 2001 web was not very good at. We’re not going to pretend our actual job is making the web weird again.

But we do try to sneak some of the old energy back in where we can.

We build custom. We don’t template. Every site we build is designed and coded for the specific client, not dropped into a theme and modified. That takes longer and costs more, but the result is a site that looks like itself instead of looking like a thousand other sites that used the same starter kit.

We leave in the human parts. The small weird detail that only makes sense if you know the client. The joke in the 404 page. The pull quote from the founder that nobody at a bigger agency would have let through because it was “off-brand.” Those are the things people remember.

We encourage clients to own their stuff. Their email list on their own domain, not just on a platform. Their blog on their own site, not just in a Medium account. Their photography in their own library, not just in Instagram’s. If a platform disappears tomorrow, their work shouldn’t disappear with it.

None of this is going to bring back the 2001 web. We know. But it means our corner of the internet still has some texture in it. That’s worth something.