Web 30: Go live
🌐 The one where we launch a newspaper and some other things...
This week is the third installment in our Web 30 series:
When I started college, I got a job at the student newspaper. Looking back, it’s an important part of the story. It was there that I created the first logo for WebBP:
While it looks pixelated today on a 4K monitor, it looked fine at 72 dpi, which was the resolution used for images on the web back then. I created it in Adobe Illustrator and it reflects my limited graphic design skills at the time. I went with a simple black and white theme and added a thin blue line to symbolize hyperlinks (which were rendered in underlined text and usually blue). I included a superscript SM in the upper righthand corner to denote this was a service mark.
As I returned to campus in the fall of 1995, I was excited to continue contributing to the world wide web and make a bigger impact. Another opportunity soon presented itself: launching our student newspaper online. I remember having a conversation with the director of student media and being tapped to lead the effort. It was quite an experience. I wrote a bit about it here:
Having the privilege of designing and launching the online edition of a five-day a week newspaper in the earliest days of the web remains one of my proudest accomplishments. We went live in March 1996, shortly after NYTimes.com in January 1996 and before WSJ.com in April 1996. I remember corresponding with developers at either the NYTimes or WSJ as we tried to figure out how to make it happen. The page layout software we used at the time, Quark XPress, would not support HTML for another six years so we had to cobble together a workflow with an XTension I’ve since forgotten the name of. Embedded in this remembrance is a recognition that I am someone who likes to create and who enjoys the challenge of starting something new.
1996
We went live on March 15, 1996 with the last issue of winter term. I remember it being a push, stressful and all sorts of things. It was also really exciting! I remember attending an event at the local country club in celebration and receiving a white mug with an orange newspaper logo on it to commemorate the occasion. I still have it.
I want to pause and publicly thank Frank Ragulsky, who was the director of student media at that time, for giving me the opportunity. He had a positive impact on the lives of so many, including me. Here are two remembrances:
Former Barometer adviser Frank Ragulsky dies at 75, leaving behind enduring legacy in college media (The Daily Barometer)
Remembering former OSU student media director Frank Ragulsky (Oregon State University)
He’s not the only person that would leave a lasting impression on me from that year. Another person I would meet on my journey was Claudia Painter1. She worked with the university’s web services team, which was based in the main library at the time. At a time when navigating from a university home page to a college site to a department site was confusing due to inconsistent design, she and her team were early proponents for usability, consistency, and accessibility. I also remember their efforts to organize information in a way that was useful for the end user. Here is an example:
In the early days, website URLs were always prefaced with “www” to delineate from other servers like “ftp” or “mail.” I remember having a conversation with Claudia one day when she was trying to figure out an alternative subdomain to use. The concern? The university was planning to start advertising on billboards and www.orst.edu — which was the URL at the time — would read like “worst education,” clearly not the brand image the university was trying to convey. In the end, the university ended up using osu.orst.edu. (In later years, it would migrate to oregonstate.edu.)
Across campus, the athletic department was looking to go online, too. I interviewed with the athletic director or assistant athletic director and got hired to develop the first web presence for the university’s nationally-ranked women’s gymnastic team. It was there that I would meet Jim Treanor. I don’t recall his exact title but he had a background in HR and worked with computers so he became my boss — and also a good mentor and friend.
I was given the media guide and set to work. I mocked up page layouts on paper and, once we had a workable design, started coding and adding content. I developed a website from scratch that included:
team roster with separate profile pages for each gymnast that included their background and career highlights by event
current season schedule
current season highlights with home meet commentaries by a special gymnastics commentator
prior season highlights
hall of fame
Here is a screenshot of an archived page with meet coverage:
In those early days of the web, it wasn’t always entirely clear for whom we were building websites. In the case of the newspaper, was it for alumni or students studying abroad? In the case of athletics, was it for recruiting or fans or both?
Because my email was on the bottom of the websites I built and maintained, I got all sorts of emails. One day, I got an email from someone claiming to be a family member of one of the gymnasts wanting to send congratulations about a recent performance. Out of a concern for stalking, we intentionally hadn’t provided contact information for the student athletes on the website. What to do? I think I probably consulted my boss and decided to forward the email to the gymnast. It seemed to be legit.
Some time later, I got a thank you email from her. We’re still in touch to this day.
It’s little things like this that make me so grateful for the opportunities I had — right time, right place — to help create a tiny little part of the web.
📚 Reference
In the spring of 1994, I got my first book about the internet. It was a heavy 818 page “complete reference.” By the spring of 1995, I had purchased my first book about the web, which covered managing a website, preparing documents, and running a server. By the fall of 1995, I acquired The HTML Sourcebook, “a complete guide to HTML.” By winter 1996, I found a title about web design. By the summer of 1996, I bought another. My reference collection would continue to grow for a few more years…
Go deeper
Here are a few hand-curated links for you about the web in 1996:
The Tangled Tale of The Times’s URL (New York Times)
The Web back in 1996-1997 (Pingdom)
Jurassic Web: The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today. (Slate)
History of NYTimes.com (Version Museum)
History of Yahoo! (Version Museum)
Early websites (Web Design Museum)
I hope you are enjoying this look back. Let me know what you think of this series so far.
Thank you for reading.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Be well,
-Bryce
PS: I may take a break next week, TBD.
She appears in this 1992 video between 0.33-1:16.