Fiction - working as a web designer in 2005 in the USA
November 15, 2015 5:25 PM Subscribe
For my NanoWrimo story, my FMC has been transported 20 years into the past and 4000 miles ("4234.7 miles, to be exact.") across the Atlantic to the USA. She works as a web designer and I have one or two questions about this.
Okay, so originally I was going to set it in 2020 and have her travel back 25 years in time, but that doesn't work so well, so have adjusted the date and time travel length, so now it is set in 2025 and she goes back to 2005, although I may set it in 2030. So:
1) What was web design like in 2005? What did you use? Anything I need to be aware of to ensure accuracy?
2) What would you do on your first day in a new web design job? Your first week? (She did this before, so it isn't her first job.)
3) How is the department organised?
4) Would she have difficulty working in 2005 after working in 2025/2030? If so, what, and how would she get around this/deal with this?
4) (a) What sort of work changes do you envision looking forwards to web design work in 2025/30?
5) What sort of ways might the internet be different in 2025? (Admittedly, predicting the future is a tricky business.)
Also, if you want to toss in any tech ideas for stuff in 2025/30 please do.
Okay, so originally I was going to set it in 2020 and have her travel back 25 years in time, but that doesn't work so well, so have adjusted the date and time travel length, so now it is set in 2025 and she goes back to 2005, although I may set it in 2030. So:
1) What was web design like in 2005? What did you use? Anything I need to be aware of to ensure accuracy?
2) What would you do on your first day in a new web design job? Your first week? (She did this before, so it isn't her first job.)
3) How is the department organised?
4) Would she have difficulty working in 2005 after working in 2025/2030? If so, what, and how would she get around this/deal with this?
4) (a) What sort of work changes do you envision looking forwards to web design work in 2025/30?
5) What sort of ways might the internet be different in 2025? (Admittedly, predicting the future is a tricky business.)
Also, if you want to toss in any tech ideas for stuff in 2025/30 please do.
Mid-2000s: Lots of slicing PSD files into web templates. Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression, and amateur work for blogging sites that allowed for custom theming (Wordpress/B2, Blogger). IE6 support, and no real concept of a web inspector quite yet. Someone doing this kind of work may not have been employed specifically as a web designer, as sometimes this work was a side duty for other computer professionals. Mobile devices were barely supported as a concept and the vast majority of people browsed the internet using a full-sized computer.
"Web design" as a profession is already going the way of the dodo in favor of "web development" and "user experience" in 2015; it probably won't exist as a concept two decades from now. People in the future will be designing interfaces that can be used on any device as well as wildly different methods of feeding data into that interface. Someone going back thirty years would basically be learning a completely foreign programming language.
posted by theraflu at 5:46 PM on November 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
"Web design" as a profession is already going the way of the dodo in favor of "web development" and "user experience" in 2015; it probably won't exist as a concept two decades from now. People in the future will be designing interfaces that can be used on any device as well as wildly different methods of feeding data into that interface. Someone going back thirty years would basically be learning a completely foreign programming language.
posted by theraflu at 5:46 PM on November 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
Also, read Oryx and Crake if you'd like an interesting example of how the web might work for someone in an alternate future.
posted by theraflu at 5:52 PM on November 15, 2015
posted by theraflu at 5:52 PM on November 15, 2015
I watched "Life On Mars" recently, the 2007 UK show about a detective who wakes up as a detective in the 70s, and I thought about what it would be like for me to wake up as a designer of some kind in the 70s. I would probably be huffing and puffing about the appalling lack of user centric design. That could be something. That in the future we have perfected user-centric design to ((fill in something ridiculous here)). I was working as a web designer in 2005 doing HTML and CSS. A lot has changed between now and then, in terms of what you can do technologically and how the professions see themselves. It seems to me like it's a continually undulating wave graph between individuals being expected to do everything (user experience, front-end development, visual design, interaction design) vs individuals being expected to specialize. You could write a story about your FMC who in the future is a highly specialized user experience researcher or content strategist who comes back and is frustrated to expected to write CSS that barely does anything, or you could equally as convincingly write a story about your FMC who is some kind of very futuristic thought-coder who can imagine and implement a fully-functional application in 30 minutes, being frustrated by having to pick a job function and stick with it. Personally I think there is a huge benefit to having someone who is focused soley on the user's needs.
I remember reading "A List Apart" a lot back then; I couldn't find much of their old content but this might interest you:
The Ways We've Changed
posted by bleep at 7:07 PM on November 15, 2015
I remember reading "A List Apart" a lot back then; I couldn't find much of their old content but this might interest you:
The Ways We've Changed
posted by bleep at 7:07 PM on November 15, 2015
It is charming and hilarious imagining how your FMC would be all "whaaa?" In 2005. It's a great scenario!
What would be her earliest experience as a "web designer"? Like now-ish?
In 2005, there was no CSS! Blogs were not standard or necessarily considered "mainstream". Sure there were online forums for sharing opinions, and Wordpress/geocities/etc, but having the ability to publish something on the Internet was still somewhat veiled in mystery for most people.
From a technology perspective, she'd probably keep going to use tech that doesn't exist or isn't used in the same way. She might seem kind of dumb because she wouldn't think to do things in the very basic "slice up a psd and put it back together in dream weaver" way that things were done in 2005.
posted by dotparker at 7:21 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
What would be her earliest experience as a "web designer"? Like now-ish?
In 2005, there was no CSS! Blogs were not standard or necessarily considered "mainstream". Sure there were online forums for sharing opinions, and Wordpress/geocities/etc, but having the ability to publish something on the Internet was still somewhat veiled in mystery for most people.
From a technology perspective, she'd probably keep going to use tech that doesn't exist or isn't used in the same way. She might seem kind of dumb because she wouldn't think to do things in the very basic "slice up a psd and put it back together in dream weaver" way that things were done in 2005.
posted by dotparker at 7:21 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: 1 & 3) The department is not organized. Everyone is confused. Being the web person still has a vast amount of overlap in many organizations with being the person who fixes the printers, on the more code-oriented end, and being the only person in the organization who knows Photoshop, on the more design-oriented end. Most of the Photoshop crowd has terrible, half-formed, brutally impractical ideas about how the web does/should work, while most of the text editor crowd is actively hostile to designer-y ideas and values and full of inchoate rage. All of this is starting to shift, but it's still a real factor even in relatively clueful environments (and will condition everything well into the present day, if we're honest).
4) I'd have difficulty working in 2005 after working on web tech through the subsequent decade, so I'm going to say yeah, probably. In 2005, browser compatibility was still a nightmare, it was still necessary to care about IE, displays were tiny, CSS still didn't really work for shit, JavaScript was a user-hostile nightmare, every other web layout was still a horrifying stew of deeply-nested <TABLE> rows, CRT monitors were still everywhere, much of the tooling we take for granted now was (at best) in its infancy, dialup-grade internet connections were ubiquitous, the field was riddled with confused amateurs (I was a confused amateur)... Basically, everything sucked.
It was also, in important ways, probably a much freer and more wide-open time.
4a / 5) You could go a number of directions with this, but there's a strong dystopian bent to a lot of the things that seem likely. The web as such seems unlikely to vanish entirely in ten years, but it's reasonable to think that the Facebookification of all things will only accelerate from here. For most normal users, the vast majority of networked communication might well take place within a handful of corporate silos, the web as platform having been replaced almost entirely by apps (or devices) locked into a specific provider's infrastructure.
On a more ambiguous note, I kind of think that heads-up displays / headsets / Google Glass but not-shitty and given the Apple-did-it-so-it's-hip-now gloss will probably have pretty good adoption by then. This is going to hit interface design and software generally like a freight train.
I don't know how long it'll take, but I expect physical keyboards and pointing devices to be eliminated, eventually, with a period of some years when they're only used in professional capacities. Programmers, accountants, and writers will probably be the last groups to give in, but they won't have much choice in the end. I'd bet that by 2025 most people only use keyboards for working purposes, and most new interfaces are designed exclusively for touch displays and maybe some kind of gestural input.
The surveillance state and corporate data-vacuuming will of course only have massively escalated. We probably won't yet have criminal penalties for intentionally disconnecting from the network, obscuring your coordinates and activity, or engaging in anonymous / unlogged financial transactions, but we'll be getting a lot closer.
posted by brennen at 7:28 PM on November 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
4) I'd have difficulty working in 2005 after working on web tech through the subsequent decade, so I'm going to say yeah, probably. In 2005, browser compatibility was still a nightmare, it was still necessary to care about IE, displays were tiny, CSS still didn't really work for shit, JavaScript was a user-hostile nightmare, every other web layout was still a horrifying stew of deeply-nested <TABLE> rows, CRT monitors were still everywhere, much of the tooling we take for granted now was (at best) in its infancy, dialup-grade internet connections were ubiquitous, the field was riddled with confused amateurs (I was a confused amateur)... Basically, everything sucked.
It was also, in important ways, probably a much freer and more wide-open time.
4a / 5) You could go a number of directions with this, but there's a strong dystopian bent to a lot of the things that seem likely. The web as such seems unlikely to vanish entirely in ten years, but it's reasonable to think that the Facebookification of all things will only accelerate from here. For most normal users, the vast majority of networked communication might well take place within a handful of corporate silos, the web as platform having been replaced almost entirely by apps (or devices) locked into a specific provider's infrastructure.
On a more ambiguous note, I kind of think that heads-up displays / headsets / Google Glass but not-shitty and given the Apple-did-it-so-it's-hip-now gloss will probably have pretty good adoption by then. This is going to hit interface design and software generally like a freight train.
I don't know how long it'll take, but I expect physical keyboards and pointing devices to be eliminated, eventually, with a period of some years when they're only used in professional capacities. Programmers, accountants, and writers will probably be the last groups to give in, but they won't have much choice in the end. I'd bet that by 2025 most people only use keyboards for working purposes, and most new interfaces are designed exclusively for touch displays and maybe some kind of gestural input.
The surveillance state and corporate data-vacuuming will of course only have massively escalated. We probably won't yet have criminal penalties for intentionally disconnecting from the network, obscuring your coordinates and activity, or engaging in anonymous / unlogged financial transactions, but we'll be getting a lot closer.
posted by brennen at 7:28 PM on November 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
Phones on the internet weren't really a thing in 2005 (first iphone wasn't for another 2 years!) , so there wasn't any thought of the mobile web as something important. There were some crappy cell phone browsers and such, but nothing that could actually do anything of substance.
posted by rockindata at 7:28 PM on November 15, 2015
posted by rockindata at 7:28 PM on November 15, 2015
Oh, also: Dreamweaver and FrontPage are both insane garbage in 2005, but they are also actively used by a lot of people.
posted by brennen at 7:29 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by brennen at 7:29 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
Notepad! A real badass (like I thought of myself as in 2005) might code HTML in Notepad rather than succumbing to Dreamweaver or the like. Also, +1 to lots of slicing up images in Photoshop and putting the pieces into table to make pixel-perfect designs.
Also: I don't have any good examples on hand, but if you google Copyright 2005 you may be able to find some sites that haven't been updated or redesigned in 9 years?
Great question!
posted by Zephyrial at 8:25 PM on November 15, 2015
Also: I don't have any good examples on hand, but if you google Copyright 2005 you may be able to find some sites that haven't been updated or redesigned in 9 years?
Great question!
posted by Zephyrial at 8:25 PM on November 15, 2015
Also: I don't have any good examples on hand, but if you google Copyright 2005 you may be able to find some sites that haven't been updated or redesigned in 9 years?
Or use the Internet Wayback Machine.
posted by PMdixon at 8:53 PM on November 15, 2015
Or use the Internet Wayback Machine.
posted by PMdixon at 8:53 PM on November 15, 2015
Best answer: I was doing web development in 2005. It's not easy remembering exactly what happened when, but most (or at least a lot of) web development was still done mostly in HTML 4, and CSS was used heavily to separate the content from the design, which a lot of people had issues with. (Oh. Just looking at other comments now, this is the < TABLE > crap brennan is talking about.) Javascript wasn't as commonly used then as it is now.
This is where I get fuzzy on the timeline, but I THINK that this is around the time that dynamic content delivery was still the new hotness that people were fighting about, and bad HTML converters were still a profitable scam. To ensure your site was even remotely readable, you still really needed extensive user testing on different platforms and browsers. This may have also been around the time that, for that reason, websites would regularly have big static banners telling you what browsers they did and did not work with.
I think SOAP was buzzy around that time too.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:22 PM on November 15, 2015
This is where I get fuzzy on the timeline, but I THINK that this is around the time that dynamic content delivery was still the new hotness that people were fighting about, and bad HTML converters were still a profitable scam. To ensure your site was even remotely readable, you still really needed extensive user testing on different platforms and browsers. This may have also been around the time that, for that reason, websites would regularly have big static banners telling you what browsers they did and did not work with.
I think SOAP was buzzy around that time too.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:22 PM on November 15, 2015
ernielundquist has it covered but
In 2005, there was no CSS!
is absolutely untrue.
posted by juv3nal at 9:33 PM on November 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
In 2005, there was no CSS!
is absolutely untrue.
posted by juv3nal at 9:33 PM on November 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
Best answer: Much of 2005 production work is going to be brute force--there will be some automation but the days of DeBabelizer are behind you. Image optimization isn't going to be a thing again for a few years yet, so there's cutting out endless layers in Photoshop or ImageReady. For your 800x600 target audience's screen, 1024x768 if you're forward-thinking. Also fonts are going to be a tremendous problem, as is most interactivity.
Endless bitching about IE. Endless.
Two things from Star Trek come immediately to mind for your character:
* Spock, in City on the Edge of Forever, where he says, "I am attempting to build a sophisticated mnemonic circuit out of stone knives and bear skins."
* Scotty, in Star Trek IV where he encounters a Macintosh computer. "A keyboard?! How quaint..."
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:50 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
Endless bitching about IE. Endless.
Two things from Star Trek come immediately to mind for your character:
* Spock, in City on the Edge of Forever, where he says, "I am attempting to build a sophisticated mnemonic circuit out of stone knives and bear skins."
* Scotty, in Star Trek IV where he encounters a Macintosh computer. "A keyboard?! How quaint..."
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:50 PM on November 15, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: It took me about a year to stop using table based layouts and learn to do it all with CSS. That year was mid-2000 to mid-2001. No one reputable was using table based layouts in 2005.
Flickr was about a year old or so, MySpace was pretty heavily trafficked, and open source software was becoming mainstream.
On my first day in a new web design job in 2004 I hunted around the shared drives on the network, I yelled at people for still using Front Page, I demanded source control, found a computer with SourceSafe installed on it and set up the dev server to use it, then demanded that everyone else use the dev server. .NET was a thing but the company I worked for still used COM-style ASP. I was asked to write an application so that specific sales people out in the field could update reports on the fly, so I wrote it in COM-style ASP and hated myself a little bit. (These are all programming tasks, but I was hired as a web designer).
The gigs I had between 2000 and 2005 were all blurry like that - I usually worked for the IS or IT department, I was almost invariably the only woman, and I frequently worked with a database guy, a mainframe guy (sometimes the mainframe guy moonlighted as the sysadmin who operated the production web servers), a couple backend programmers, and I filled in all the gaps to get stuff on a website.
My job was to provide fully designed layouts in Photoshop, then defend in meetings why I couldn't get the screens to look exactly like those layouts on every browser.
2005 was Web 2.0 - interfaces were starting to use giant headlines and big fat buttons and very simple layouts (a lot of today's familiar layouts would not be out of place in 2005, with the exception of giant hero images, ghost buttons, and parallax).
The KEY THING that people have mentioned obliquely so far is that in 2005 we were just on the cusp of social networking - we *thought* we had social networks, we were on Mefi and Flickr and MySpace, but we mostly built our communities around our own blogs, blogs were becoming cultish, non-technical people were becoming mainstream popular via their blogs. We had APIs, new app creators considered it very important to open up their APIs as part of their strategy, we were talking a lot about AJAX and JSON (and marvelling at how they were used by Gmail) but we hadn't yet really started centralizing our communication on social networks.
If I were to project what my job would look like ten years from now, I think the focus would likely still be getting social networks to talk across apps. There are always specialized tools being built to accomplish that sort of thing, but everyone likes their own tools, and there's a good chance someone with my title would simply have the job of using GUI tools to hook things up to create new stuff - or, in the opposite direction, as it currently stands, a front end dev might have to be a good programmer with the ability to learn a lot of different languages quickly and flexibly because platform popularity and funding keeps changing.
I decided to start coding for WordPress in 2005, and I backed the right horse - I'm a developer, working as a front end developer, but every single thing I've learned in the last 15 years makes it possible for me to write modern HTML and CSS (SCSS) with a lot of JavaScript and some PHP and a pretty solid understanding of how you get from the database to the phone screen.
Doing web development between 1998 and 2008 was frequently like hitting a rock with a hammer and trying to make David appear - it often felt like everything was working against me, from network latency to slow computers, to inflexible layouts, to IE6 (shakes fist). I think if someone learned the trade in 2020, say, and went back in time 15 years, they would be learning all over again for the first time.
Personally, the last five years on the web have been the most fun for me. The stuff I imagined we could do in 1998 became possible around 2011 or so - we literally had smartphones for almost 5 years before I started seeing apps that I felt truly understood the device.
posted by annathea at 10:06 PM on November 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
Flickr was about a year old or so, MySpace was pretty heavily trafficked, and open source software was becoming mainstream.
On my first day in a new web design job in 2004 I hunted around the shared drives on the network, I yelled at people for still using Front Page, I demanded source control, found a computer with SourceSafe installed on it and set up the dev server to use it, then demanded that everyone else use the dev server. .NET was a thing but the company I worked for still used COM-style ASP. I was asked to write an application so that specific sales people out in the field could update reports on the fly, so I wrote it in COM-style ASP and hated myself a little bit. (These are all programming tasks, but I was hired as a web designer).
The gigs I had between 2000 and 2005 were all blurry like that - I usually worked for the IS or IT department, I was almost invariably the only woman, and I frequently worked with a database guy, a mainframe guy (sometimes the mainframe guy moonlighted as the sysadmin who operated the production web servers), a couple backend programmers, and I filled in all the gaps to get stuff on a website.
My job was to provide fully designed layouts in Photoshop, then defend in meetings why I couldn't get the screens to look exactly like those layouts on every browser.
2005 was Web 2.0 - interfaces were starting to use giant headlines and big fat buttons and very simple layouts (a lot of today's familiar layouts would not be out of place in 2005, with the exception of giant hero images, ghost buttons, and parallax).
The KEY THING that people have mentioned obliquely so far is that in 2005 we were just on the cusp of social networking - we *thought* we had social networks, we were on Mefi and Flickr and MySpace, but we mostly built our communities around our own blogs, blogs were becoming cultish, non-technical people were becoming mainstream popular via their blogs. We had APIs, new app creators considered it very important to open up their APIs as part of their strategy, we were talking a lot about AJAX and JSON (and marvelling at how they were used by Gmail) but we hadn't yet really started centralizing our communication on social networks.
If I were to project what my job would look like ten years from now, I think the focus would likely still be getting social networks to talk across apps. There are always specialized tools being built to accomplish that sort of thing, but everyone likes their own tools, and there's a good chance someone with my title would simply have the job of using GUI tools to hook things up to create new stuff - or, in the opposite direction, as it currently stands, a front end dev might have to be a good programmer with the ability to learn a lot of different languages quickly and flexibly because platform popularity and funding keeps changing.
I decided to start coding for WordPress in 2005, and I backed the right horse - I'm a developer, working as a front end developer, but every single thing I've learned in the last 15 years makes it possible for me to write modern HTML and CSS (SCSS) with a lot of JavaScript and some PHP and a pretty solid understanding of how you get from the database to the phone screen.
Doing web development between 1998 and 2008 was frequently like hitting a rock with a hammer and trying to make David appear - it often felt like everything was working against me, from network latency to slow computers, to inflexible layouts, to IE6 (shakes fist). I think if someone learned the trade in 2020, say, and went back in time 15 years, they would be learning all over again for the first time.
Personally, the last five years on the web have been the most fun for me. The stuff I imagined we could do in 1998 became possible around 2011 or so - we literally had smartphones for almost 5 years before I started seeing apps that I felt truly understood the device.
posted by annathea at 10:06 PM on November 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
I remember AJAX and sorta semi-functional CSS being the hotness everyone was talking about in 2005. Gmail was still a reasonably new product at the time and had given people a lot to think about as far as what kinds of interactions you could aspire to on a website. If you were writing JavaScript, it was raw JavaScript, without the layers upon layers of libraries programmers have now to make it usable.
I was on Facebook at the time, but it was still only for college students. Yelp was a new product and had little traction outside the bay area.
This question is making me feel incredibly old, by the way.
posted by town of cats at 10:25 PM on November 15, 2015
I was on Facebook at the time, but it was still only for college students. Yelp was a new product and had little traction outside the bay area.
This question is making me feel incredibly old, by the way.
posted by town of cats at 10:25 PM on November 15, 2015
Lots of Flash if you wanted any interactivity. Otherwise it was tables, tables, tables. Oh, and frames were still a thing. Worrying about people's connection speed was still a thing too.
In a way though it might be more about the person's ability to learn "the next thing" even if the next thing was older rather than newer.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:17 PM on November 15, 2015
In a way though it might be more about the person's ability to learn "the next thing" even if the next thing was older rather than newer.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:17 PM on November 15, 2015
Best answer: The guy who used to be Intel's pet futurist talked a lot about what the world will look like when everything we manufacture has a computer in it. Your clothes, your plates, cars, cookware, every piece of furniture. It will be so cheap to build it in, why not?
We haven't figured out what that interactivity will really work like, though I think the most realistic interaction I've seen so far as a vision of the future might be the character in The Diamond Age that kills himself because his eyes get infected with malware that incessantly plays an ad for a roach motel. Coming from a future where your bagel wrapper can spam you to a world of 2G featurephones might be a shocking bit of silence if you're not used to it anymore.
Speaking of phones and lack of support, your character's probably going to have to deal with Flash. Browser support for CSS1 is growing at this point. There will be float-based layouts but different box model implementations (see IE above) will make them irritating to implement, leading to people giving up and using tables because life is too damn short. Standards-based coding is making inroads, Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards has only the first edition so far but not everybody is listening. XHTML may or may not be the way and the light, jury is still out but Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Robbins makes a damn fine case for it. The book that everyone has on their desk but probably still hasn't read is Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability.
Nobody is going to talk about Agile yet at this point, so your character might have to get used to endless meetings, or doing things unsupervised, depending on the size of the group. Speaking of that, organization-wise the group is going to either be in marketing, where nobody will understand what they do, or an appendix to engineering, where they aren't "real" programmers so their work will be discounted. (This is mostly unchanged even now, at least in my experience. Perhaps the future will be better.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:21 PM on November 15, 2015
We haven't figured out what that interactivity will really work like, though I think the most realistic interaction I've seen so far as a vision of the future might be the character in The Diamond Age that kills himself because his eyes get infected with malware that incessantly plays an ad for a roach motel. Coming from a future where your bagel wrapper can spam you to a world of 2G featurephones might be a shocking bit of silence if you're not used to it anymore.
Speaking of phones and lack of support, your character's probably going to have to deal with Flash. Browser support for CSS1 is growing at this point. There will be float-based layouts but different box model implementations (see IE above) will make them irritating to implement, leading to people giving up and using tables because life is too damn short. Standards-based coding is making inroads, Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards has only the first edition so far but not everybody is listening. XHTML may or may not be the way and the light, jury is still out but Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Robbins makes a damn fine case for it. The book that everyone has on their desk but probably still hasn't read is Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability.
Nobody is going to talk about Agile yet at this point, so your character might have to get used to endless meetings, or doing things unsupervised, depending on the size of the group. Speaking of that, organization-wise the group is going to either be in marketing, where nobody will understand what they do, or an appendix to engineering, where they aren't "real" programmers so their work will be discounted. (This is mostly unchanged even now, at least in my experience. Perhaps the future will be better.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:21 PM on November 15, 2015
Best answer: My answer is for a web designer in academia, rather than at a dedicated design company.
Back in 2005 I was building websites in Dreamweaver, with PHP includes to pull in repeating elements like menus and footers. I used CSS to style headings and paragraphs, but display text (menus, sidebar headings, etc.) were graphics (made with Photoshop) and layouts were mostly still built with tables. I spent a lot of my time helping the admin assistants for various departments figure out how to update their sites. (Why did my menu break? Why aren't my updates showing up on the server? How do I make this complicated table?)
One of the other colleges on campus was using a simple CMS called Urban Planet. It limited you to using a simple WYSIWYG editor to type in a huge where your page's content went. When our colleges merged several years later, I spent a lot of time struggling with Urban Planet to figure out how to make things display properly with its horribly-invalid code.
The "department" was me. We had a "server guy" in the next building who kept things running and admin assistants around campus who would make simple text updates with Dreamweaver, but I was the only official "web person" and the only one who really understood how to do HTML or CSS. The first week of a new job would be spent getting FTP access and analyzing the existing sites to see how they were coded and what needed to be updated/changed.
posted by belladonna at 5:26 AM on November 16, 2015
Back in 2005 I was building websites in Dreamweaver, with PHP includes to pull in repeating elements like menus and footers. I used CSS to style headings and paragraphs, but display text (menus, sidebar headings, etc.) were graphics (made with Photoshop) and layouts were mostly still built with tables. I spent a lot of my time helping the admin assistants for various departments figure out how to update their sites. (Why did my menu break? Why aren't my updates showing up on the server? How do I make this complicated table?)
One of the other colleges on campus was using a simple CMS called Urban Planet. It limited you to using a simple WYSIWYG editor to type in a huge where your page's content went. When our colleges merged several years later, I spent a lot of time struggling with Urban Planet to figure out how to make things display properly with its horribly-invalid code.
The "department" was me. We had a "server guy" in the next building who kept things running and admin assistants around campus who would make simple text updates with Dreamweaver, but I was the only official "web person" and the only one who really understood how to do HTML or CSS. The first week of a new job would be spent getting FTP access and analyzing the existing sites to see how they were coded and what needed to be updated/changed.
posted by belladonna at 5:26 AM on November 16, 2015
Lots of ActiveX bullshit that makes your site unusable by anyone not using a Windows machine.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:27 AM on November 16, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 6:27 AM on November 16, 2015 [2 favorites]
Nobody is going to talk about Agile yet at this point, so your character might have to get used to endless meetings, or doing things unsupervised, depending on the size of the group.
I think this is not quite accurate. Agile and its intellectual precursors were a thing on some teams ca. 2005, and there was a lot of noise about them on the internet. That said, it hadn't become the dominant process cult yet by a long shot, and a lot of design oriented folks wouldn't have heard of it or would only catch it peripherally from more programmery types.
Hrm. Having said that, I think the "we're doing Agile!" team I first remember seeing in the wild was maybe 2006-07, but I think they'd been at it for a bit. Wikipedia says the manifesto came out in 2001, and I think a lot of the ideas that got rolled up there were floating around Ward's Wiki and suchlike places already in the late 90s.
posted by brennen at 6:35 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
I think this is not quite accurate. Agile and its intellectual precursors were a thing on some teams ca. 2005, and there was a lot of noise about them on the internet. That said, it hadn't become the dominant process cult yet by a long shot, and a lot of design oriented folks wouldn't have heard of it or would only catch it peripherally from more programmery types.
Hrm. Having said that, I think the "we're doing Agile!" team I first remember seeing in the wild was maybe 2006-07, but I think they'd been at it for a bit. Wikipedia says the manifesto came out in 2001, and I think a lot of the ideas that got rolled up there were floating around Ward's Wiki and suchlike places already in the late 90s.
posted by brennen at 6:35 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I was a web designer and developer in a tech business and then academia in 2005. We absolutely used CSS for layout, but it could be extremely painful. We used a reset CSS too. Dreamweaver was a thing. My colleague was still programming in PHP 3, but it was soon deprecated in favor of 4. A year later we were building a custom CMS using a PHP MVC framework. It was a few years before Wordpress and Drupal started making serious inroads where I was.
Social networks were Friendster, Tribe, Myspace, and Livejournal.
posted by expialidocious at 9:05 AM on November 16, 2015
Social networks were Friendster, Tribe, Myspace, and Livejournal.
posted by expialidocious at 9:05 AM on November 16, 2015
I second the use of Notepad, even though I probably used it much longer than I should have, because it's what I was used to. And a lot of the tools available put so much extra bloat in there, it was just easier to make clean code by hand.
Here's a PDF of CSS Web Design for Dummies from 2005. You can also find some reference books on Amazon, like Bulletproof Web Design and Access By Design, with versions published in 2005.
(Looking these things up reminds me of a book I got in 1992 called The Whole Internet. The section about the World Wide Web was only one or two pages.)
posted by themissy at 9:09 AM on November 16, 2015
Here's a PDF of CSS Web Design for Dummies from 2005. You can also find some reference books on Amazon, like Bulletproof Web Design and Access By Design, with versions published in 2005.
(Looking these things up reminds me of a book I got in 1992 called The Whole Internet. The section about the World Wide Web was only one or two pages.)
posted by themissy at 9:09 AM on November 16, 2015
"Web designer" often meant "UI / graphic designer who works with a coder". Ie someone who works pretty much entirely in photoshop and documents, collaborating with someone who works pretty much entirely in code (html, etc). Or graphic designer with UI designer-coder, or other departmental permutations.
posted by anonymisc at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2015
posted by anonymisc at 11:40 AM on November 16, 2015
Response by poster: Thanks everyone. This isn't a major part of the plot, but it has made me think about how it is going to work in regards to FMC going back in time, and what she would need to know to do the job versus what she knows from her current (2025) job.
Love the Friendster/myspace comment - that is something I hadn't thought about. Interestingly, I wrote today a piece where a friend in 2005 sets her up on a blind date, and wrote this dialogue:
There was a moment of silence, and then Mallory said, "so why did you agree to this?"
"I didn't," said Kerry. "Melissa set me, set us up."
"Set us up the bomb," said Mallory.
Kerry laughed. "That meme is so old now, but its been all over the net recently."
"So old?"
Kerry suddenly remembered which year it was. Back in 2025 the meme had suddenly been big all over the net when a TV program used it in a flashback in an episode, and suddenly it was everywhere. She had looked it up, and found out where it had originated, and how old it was, and now she had to remember it wasn't that long ago for the time she now lived in.
posted by marienbad at 4:52 PM on November 16, 2015
Love the Friendster/myspace comment - that is something I hadn't thought about. Interestingly, I wrote today a piece where a friend in 2005 sets her up on a blind date, and wrote this dialogue:
There was a moment of silence, and then Mallory said, "so why did you agree to this?"
"I didn't," said Kerry. "Melissa set me, set us up."
"Set us up the bomb," said Mallory.
Kerry laughed. "That meme is so old now, but its been all over the net recently."
"So old?"
Kerry suddenly remembered which year it was. Back in 2025 the meme had suddenly been big all over the net when a TV program used it in a flashback in an episode, and suddenly it was everywhere. She had looked it up, and found out where it had originated, and how old it was, and now she had to remember it wasn't that long ago for the time she now lived in.
posted by marienbad at 4:52 PM on November 16, 2015
2005 was also about when Microsoft started moving away (perhaps in name only) from that whole .NET thing.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:28 PM on November 17, 2015
posted by Thorzdad at 5:28 PM on November 17, 2015
Best answer: Re: 1), I was a very amateur codemonkey in 2005, and even I knew that using tables for layout was bad practice, so I don't think table-based layouts were really a thing in newer sites by 2005. I used the CSS that was available to me at the time, though not much JavaScript.
Re: 4), I would speculate that your FMC designs for a wide variety of device sizes/screen resolutions in 2025, so she is going to be really thrown by losing the CSS properties that drive responsive design. (I'm thinking particularly about the CSS flexbox properties, which have spotty browser support now, but which I think will either be widely standardized in browsers by 2025, or replaced with something else.) With that in mind, a believable detail might be that it takes her a really long time to figure out how to center a part of her design vertically, because neither flexbox nor the next best approach of 2015, transform: translate, is available to her in 2005. She will also probably complain about how when buttons are clicked, links are hovered over, etc., the changes are very jarring without CSS transitions (nonexistent in 2005) to smooth them out a bit.
As far as job titles go, I would guess the 2025 equivalent of "web designer" will probably have some combination of "front-end", "user experience," "interaction design," and/or "engineer" in the title.
posted by Owlcat at 8:37 PM on November 17, 2015
Re: 4), I would speculate that your FMC designs for a wide variety of device sizes/screen resolutions in 2025, so she is going to be really thrown by losing the CSS properties that drive responsive design. (I'm thinking particularly about the CSS flexbox properties, which have spotty browser support now, but which I think will either be widely standardized in browsers by 2025, or replaced with something else.) With that in mind, a believable detail might be that it takes her a really long time to figure out how to center a part of her design vertically, because neither flexbox nor the next best approach of 2015, transform: translate, is available to her in 2005. She will also probably complain about how when buttons are clicked, links are hovered over, etc., the changes are very jarring without CSS transitions (nonexistent in 2005) to smooth them out a bit.
As far as job titles go, I would guess the 2025 equivalent of "web designer" will probably have some combination of "front-end", "user experience," "interaction design," and/or "engineer" in the title.
posted by Owlcat at 8:37 PM on November 17, 2015
One other thing that would be fun to look at is, what were the computers and monitors and such they (we) were using in 2005?
22" monitor was huge back then.... I was writing code back then and had to install stuff on old XP machines, Windows 2000 servers all that fun.
Look forward to reading the end result!
posted by drinkmaildave at 7:01 PM on November 18, 2015
22" monitor was huge back then.... I was writing code back then and had to install stuff on old XP machines, Windows 2000 servers all that fun.
Look forward to reading the end result!
posted by drinkmaildave at 7:01 PM on November 18, 2015
Response by poster: Okay everyone, I wrote this just now, so am putting it out here so you can see how your input is beginning to have an impact on my story. It is meant to be funny, so I hope it makes you laugh.
He told her he was a time traveller, and then asked, "What's the date?"
"Today? It's March the 21st," said Kerry, standing up in surprise. "Who are you?"
"Good, I got here on time, then," he said. "Like I said, I'm a time traveller; as to who I am, well, that's rather a long story, and I haven't got time to explain it all right now. Here," he unslung a bag from his back. "Catch," he said, and threw it over. Kerry caught it; it was fairly heavy, and she staggered slightly as the weight of it hit her.
"What is it?" She asked, looking from the bag to the time traveller.
"Just some stuff you need to read and learn about. Good luck, I've not got much time right now... " He looked at a gadget on his wrist. "Okay, correction, I haven't got any time right now, I've got to go..."
He tapped some buttons on the gadget and another shimmering oval of white and blue appeared and he jumped through it, and it closed up behind him. Kerry watched as it irised closed and vanished with another awesome popping sound effect. As a science fiction fan in general, and a Star Trek fan in particular, Kerry could appreciate the coolness of this. She sat down again, placing the bag on the floor in front of her, and opened it. Inside were several books about web design and programming, but they were all ancient.
"HTML 4.0?" She read, looking at the title of the first one as she removed it from the bag. She continued to take the other books out, reading their titles and placing them on the settee next to her. "Coldfusion programming for beginners, Understanding CSS, Programming Websites with DreamWeaver, and a similar one for FrontPage, Making Cool MySpace Pages." She shook her head. "Why has he given me these? And what the hell is a MySpace?" She wondered aloud. She reached back into the bag, opening the top wider, and saw there was more to come. "AJAX and JSON: The future of Interactive Webdesign: Why A User-Centric Philosophy is the Way Forwards, Flash! Ah-arrrghh!, Windows XP: Under the Hood, Windows 2000: Under the Hood." The last two had CD's attached to them. What the hell? Thought Kerry. This stuff is all ancient, it's from like, the dinosaur age of the Internet. I will never need to know any of this. And CDs? Wow, what time is this guy from, the dark ages or something?
posted by marienbad at 5:02 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
He told her he was a time traveller, and then asked, "What's the date?"
"Today? It's March the 21st," said Kerry, standing up in surprise. "Who are you?"
"Good, I got here on time, then," he said. "Like I said, I'm a time traveller; as to who I am, well, that's rather a long story, and I haven't got time to explain it all right now. Here," he unslung a bag from his back. "Catch," he said, and threw it over. Kerry caught it; it was fairly heavy, and she staggered slightly as the weight of it hit her.
"What is it?" She asked, looking from the bag to the time traveller.
"Just some stuff you need to read and learn about. Good luck, I've not got much time right now... " He looked at a gadget on his wrist. "Okay, correction, I haven't got any time right now, I've got to go..."
He tapped some buttons on the gadget and another shimmering oval of white and blue appeared and he jumped through it, and it closed up behind him. Kerry watched as it irised closed and vanished with another awesome popping sound effect. As a science fiction fan in general, and a Star Trek fan in particular, Kerry could appreciate the coolness of this. She sat down again, placing the bag on the floor in front of her, and opened it. Inside were several books about web design and programming, but they were all ancient.
"HTML 4.0?" She read, looking at the title of the first one as she removed it from the bag. She continued to take the other books out, reading their titles and placing them on the settee next to her. "Coldfusion programming for beginners, Understanding CSS, Programming Websites with DreamWeaver, and a similar one for FrontPage, Making Cool MySpace Pages." She shook her head. "Why has he given me these? And what the hell is a MySpace?" She wondered aloud. She reached back into the bag, opening the top wider, and saw there was more to come. "AJAX and JSON: The future of Interactive Webdesign: Why A User-Centric Philosophy is the Way Forwards, Flash! Ah-arrrghh!, Windows XP: Under the Hood, Windows 2000: Under the Hood." The last two had CD's attached to them. What the hell? Thought Kerry. This stuff is all ancient, it's from like, the dinosaur age of the Internet. I will never need to know any of this. And CDs? Wow, what time is this guy from, the dark ages or something?
posted by marienbad at 5:02 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by askmehow at 5:43 PM on November 15, 2015