My first attempts at creating a website was in the late 1990’s. In early 2000 I actually even created one that was a commercial website. It is in Swedish, but I found it on the Way Back Machine, you can check it out through this link.
The site was coded using framesets, and it had three sections (header, menu and content areas). Framesets are not commonly used today, even though it is still valid I believe. When I created this site we were still in the early days of when Internet became commonly available. There’s animated gifs which probably is not something you’re gonna find on a professional site now.
That site was which basically is an online newspaper. You could read the same articles that was in the actual paper. All articles linked from a menu, so it is a very basic page in reality. There’s nothing like the kind of newpaper sites we are used to seeing on news sites today.
Creating a website today
We have come along way since those early days. In many ways it was simpler to code back then, but it was also harder to create an interesting site. Today we have a lot more interesting tools in the toolbox that allows us to create a website.
The introduction of cascading style sheets (CSS) gave us a nice set of tools to make a site look good. CSS allows us to control the layout, the colors and what font we want on any given section of the site.
In many ways we still create webpages that behaves and, at a first glance, have the same layouts as the old frameset pages. For instance there is usually a header and a footer area, and it is not uncommon with a menu or two either. The main difference is that today we often use PHP to create and call certain content into a specific part of our layout.