UX&UI After the Early Days: Web Design from the Late 90s to 2010

From table layouts and Flash intros to CSS standards, Web 2.0 gloss, and the first truly app-like websites — the messy, brilliant era that shaped modern UX.

11.02.2026 BY Jakub

UX&UI After the Early Days: Web Design from the Late 90s to 2010 header image

Introduction

1995 → 2000 ↓ 2000 → 2010 ↓ Did any of these sites survive? ↓ What this era gave us ↓

Part 2: from dial‑up websites to “web apps”

If Part 1 was the web discovering that design exists, this era is the web discovering that design must scale — more users, more content, more browsers, more devices, and suddenly real money.

Start with Part 1 here: UX&UI in the Early Days: Web Design in the 80s and 90s.

“The late 90s and 2000s didn’t just change how websites looked. They changed what a website was allowed to be.”

From static pages to interactive experiences: late 90s and 2000s web design culture

1995 → 2000

The “layout wars” phase: tables, frames, and attention grabs

By the late 90s, websites stopped feeling like documents and started acting like interfaces. But the technology wasn’t ready, so designers invented a design language out of constraints, compromises, and hacks.

What it looked like

Table layouts everywhere (nested tables inside nested tables)
Frames for persistent navigation (and unbookmarkable misery)
Animated GIFs as UI feedback (and as decoration, and as “please look here”)
“Portal” homepages that tried to be a whole internet in one screen
Splash pages and “Skip intro” links (the first UX consent checkbox)
Fixed-width layouts designed around common screens (often 800×600 thinking)

In this era, being noticed often mattered more than being understood — because a website’s biggest enemy was the Back button.

Functionality changes you could feel

This is where UX became business‑critical: checkout flows, account creation, search, and support. Design problems weren’t “is it pretty?” but:

Can people trust this site with a credit card?
Can they find the right product in under 30 seconds?
Can they recover from errors without rage‑quitting?

Early UX wins that still matter:

Amazon‑style search + filters (primitive compared to today, but revolutionary then)
Persistent carts and “recently viewed” patterns (memory as a feature)
Clear navigation labels replacing cute metaphors (fewer “Enter the Vault” buttons)

The pioneers (services)

Yahoo! and MSN: the portal era perfected. Dense, navigational, “everything at once.”
Amazon and eBay: early proof that UX = revenue (search, categories, checkout, trust).
GeoCities / Angelfire: the messy, DIY web — a design laboratory with zero guardrails.
Hotmail: one of the first widely used “apps in a browser”.

The pioneers (people)

Jakob Nielsen: pushed usability into mainstream conversation (even when it was unpopular).
Steve Krug: made “don’t make me think” the default critique of confusing UI.
David Siegel: celebrated visual experimentation — and also helped normalize “design first” thinking.

Late 90s web layout and navigation patterns with dense interfaces and early ecommerce structure

🧪 Not‑so‑successful experiments (but iconic)

Frames as a “layout system”: navigation felt stable, but sharing links became painful.
Mystery meat navigation: unlabeled icons and “cool” metaphors that nobody understood.
Flash intros: impressive motion, terrible accessibility, slow loads, and often a dead end for SEO.
Browser‑specific sites: “Best viewed in…” was basically a bug report as a badge.
Horizontal scrolling “experiences”: memorable when done well, exhausting when content wasn’t built for it.

🔍 Fun unknowns from this era

Favicons were introduced as an Internet Explorer feature for Favorites/bookmarks, then became a universal UX signpost.
“View Source culture” mattered: many designers learned by copying and remixing real sites.
One‑pixel GIFs weren’t only spacing hacks — they were also used as primitive tracking beacons.
Text as images was common: designers wanted typography control long before web fonts were practical.

Transition from late 90s visual chaos to more structured early 2000s website layouts

2000 → 2010

Web standards, Web 2.0 aesthetics, and the first real web apps

The dot‑com crash didn’t kill the web — it killed the fantasy. After that, teams cared more about clarity, performance, and conversions.

The big shift: from “page design” to “system design”

Designers moved from drawing pages to building reusable rules:

CSS‑first layout (tableless design, semantic HTML)
Design systems (before we called them that): shared navigation, shared buttons, shared UI patterns
Content strategy started to matter because websites became content machines
Grid thinking spread (fixed-width grids, then early flexible layouts)

This is the era where “web design” split into roles: visual design, UX, interaction design, frontend engineering, information architecture.

“The web stopped being a poster and became a product.”

The web becomes a product with reusable UI patterns, repeated components, and system thinking

Web 2.0: the glossy button decade

Visually, the 2000s developed a recognizable “Web 2.0” look:

Glossy gradients, glassy highlights, and reflective icons
Rounded corners (before CSS made it easy)
Badges, ribbons, and “beta” labels as trust signals and excitement cues
Big search bars and simplified landing pages (Google’s influence was real)
Tag clouds, RSS icons, and sharing widgets as visible “social web” UI

And yes: skeuomorphism got louder. Not just “paper” textures — but icons and UI that tried to behave like real objects to reduce fear.

AJAX: the moment the web learned “no refresh”

By the mid‑2000s, JavaScript + the browser DOM enabled a new promise: actions could happen without full page reloads.

This changed UX dramatically:

Auto‑suggest search became normal
Inline validation reduced form frustration
Loading states (spinners, skeletons) became part of the interface language
Maps, email, and feeds started behaving like desktop software
More state to manage: URLs, Back button behavior, and “where am I?” became new UX problems

Pioneering services that proved it worked:

Gmail: search‑first email, fast interactions, labels over folders
Google Maps: drag the map, zoom, explore — a new kind of “interface joy”
Flickr: tagging, social photo UX, and community patterns that shaped Web 2.0
Wikipedia: “boring” UI with extremely successful information architecture

Designers who shaped how the web was built (not only how it looked)

Jeffrey Zeldman and the web standards movement: a public fight for cleaner HTML/CSS and accessibility.
Eric Meyer: normalized CSS literacy and patterns (the kind that became “common knowledge” later).
Jesse James Garrett: clarified interaction thinking and helped frame AJAX as a design shift.
Douglas Bowman: influential early web visual thinking (and later shaped how Google approached design).
Dave Shea: helped make CSS and separation-of-concerns feel “real” to designers (and not only to engineers).

The early 2000s transition toward clearer interfaces and web standards-driven design

📉 Things that aged badly (and why they happened)

“Skip intro” + splash screens: branding wanted cinematic control; users wanted speed.
Flash‑only websites: creativity peaked, but accessibility, SEO, and mobile support eventually punished it.
Pop‑ups and pop‑unders: short‑term growth hacks that trained users to hate ads (and install blockers).
IE6 era compromises: CSS hacks, broken PNG transparency, layout bugs — progress slowed by compatibility.
MySpace‑style profile customization: democratized expression, but often destroyed readability and safety.
Autoplay audio: a “wow” moment that became a trust killer.

A lot of “bad design” in the 2000s was actually “design without constraints” — the web learning where rules are useful.

Examples of noisy web patterns from the 2000s, including heavy effects and intrusive UI elements

Did any of these sites survive?

Yes — and some are still recognizable

Amazon: still category + search driven, still obsessed with conversion UX.
eBay: still marketplaces, listings, and trust systems (feedback loops).
Craigslist: almost a museum exhibit of “content first, decoration last.”
Wikipedia: same core layout philosophy — scanning, hierarchy, and link density.
Google: minimal homepage legacy that influenced a decade of landing page design.

And for the rest: the web’s memory is still online. If you want to see the designs again, the best time machine is the Wayback Machine — and curated collections like Web Design Museum.

Long-lived websites that kept content-first structure and recognizable navigation patterns

What this era gave us

The foundation for modern UX/UI

By 2010, the web had established a few rules that still shape products today:

Speed is UX (performance isn’t engineering trivia anymore)
Consistency beats creativity in complex systems (patterns reduce learning cost)
Design is collaborative (UX, UI, frontend, content, research)
Interfaces are systems (components, states, empty cases, error cases)

Sources:

A List Apart Web Design Museum 📓 Nielsen Norman Group articles 📚 Steve Krug — Don’t Make Me Think 📚 Jeffrey Zeldman — Designing with Web Standards 🎓 Study: Jesse James Garrett — Ajax 📓 Internet Archive / Wayback Machine

Thanks for reading ✌️