When My Web Was Young
Just a few minutes ago, I upgraded this site to the latest version of WordPress: version 3.0, release candidate 1. This means that it’s not officially released, but it’s no longer a beta. The developers are pretty sure they’re done, but they want brave souls to test the software before officially releasing it. I’ve used beta and release candidate software for years on production sites and machines, even though developers always advise against it. I don’t know too many people that have a entire spare lab of computers hanging around to test software. If it doesn’t get tested in a working environment, how will it ever get properly tested? That’s my theory. My company has always actively used beta software in our day-to-day operation, from Windows NT 5.0 (which became Windows 2000
I read the WordPress blog post where Matt Mullenweg talks about how he can’t believe WordPress has reached version 3 and that it seems like just yesterday they launched. I actually can relate. It seems that just yesterday I was feeling ballsy and installed the beta for WordPress 2 on my server. I’ve been using WordPress for much longer than I thought I have, since the 1.5 days actually, and before that things were even more interesting.
Like most geeks, I first started playing around with websites in the late 90s when there were billions of free web hosts, such as Xoom, Geocities, Tripod, etc. I used all three of those. Then, I moved to Homestead. I stayed with Homestead for a very long time, actually paying for the service. I stopped using it when they stopped supporting the Macintosh, and then I really didn’t know what to do. I tried designing my own pages in HTML. I built various websites in Dreamweaver
It seemed like after a while, the really easy-to-use web design software disappeared. Software that hacked the web completely, and followed absolutely no standards whatsoever, but was so fucking easy to use that my grandma could have built her own version of Amazon.com, just vanished…. and web development went from something everyone in the world did, to something really experienced (and expensive) developers that took the time to write their own code and follow standards did. After the early 2000s, software started to be more standards compliant, and it was once again easier to build a website, but in the meantime, I, along with a lot of other people, switched to web-based CMS software, like WordPress.
The first software I tried was Movable Type. I was using Active Web Hosting at the time, and their web servers and CGI/PHP servers were separate. MovableType was in its infancy, and it was REALLY hard to use. I played around with it for a few days, and then decided to try out TypePad, which was the company’s hosted and paid version of the software. It just didn’t do what I wanted it to do. It wasn’t as easy to use as Homestead, so I gave up having a website for a while.
After a few years (or months… who knows in the tech world), I stumbled across WordPress and gave it a try. It still wasn’t like Homestead, but I still used it. I learned to live with the limitations of the new web. No longer could websites look exactly like a document created in a page-layout program, or a single graphic, if you were an amateur. You had to know a lot of code to do stuff like that. It had to be standards compliant, or it’d look like ass in all the new browsers that people were using, like Mozilla Firefox, and Opera…. because Internet Explorer was going away as well. My new websites weren’t as clever, creative, and full of content as my old Homestead site… but that’s because WordPress didn’t do all that. What it did do is make content easy to publish, and easy to navigate, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Today, most people use CMS software to publish their sites. I’ve built sites for clients using WordPress, MovableType, ExpressionEngine, Joomla, and more. I’ve also built sites from scratch the hard way. And I’ve changed a lot as a designer. Now, I’m more minimalist. Less is more. A few fonts that are consistent on every page, because they’re defined that way in CSS code, is better than trying out every single font you have installed on your computer every time you write a new sentence. Graphics are used to supplement text, not instead of text. Things are easy to navigate, and most sites function the same way.
Without this change…. without content management systems that didn’t let people do whatever they wanted like the old web software did, the web became more consistent. Content became the primary goal. If this would not have happened, its doubtful that we’d have the complex web apps we have today. We wouldn’t have a generation of elderly people that still can access information the way the youth of today do. My grandma wouldn’t be on Facebook, and my website would look like shit…. along with every other free website out there.
The web grew up. For a while, it became a premium place, and then, once everything was in the right place, it was opened up to everyone again. We had to reset things, because it was out of control. I can only imagine how much chaos there would be if domain names were free, instead of just storage space. It’s likely that companies would never be able to register their names, and we’d have an entirely different way of accessing individual destinations on the web.
The old web was a disaster, and WordPress was one of the ways that things were fixed. It simplified the web, and it made it consistent. It made it possible for the average person to create a professional looking site without exposing their awful design taste (if they had awful design taste) to the public. It forced us to be a little bit boring, but at the same time, it made all of the stuff that makes the web so great, the content, the information, the text that describes facts or fiction or memories, easy to find and read. It helped turn the web from an amateur art gallery into a huge library.
WordPress is important, and it will continue to be. Thanks, WP.