I don’t remember much about my first website.

It must have been around 1998, I was 12 years old and I wrote my HTML in a pirated copy of an IDE called Allaire HomeSite on my 133MHz Pentium machine running Windows 95. I got my first 56k dial-up modem for Christmas the year before and I spent way too much time online, which caused my grades to deteriorate and the phone bill to explode.

I do not remember where the site was hosted (must have been one of those free 1 MB web space services) nor do I remember what the URL was or what was really on it content-wise. But I do remember it had everything a 90s website had to have: a hit counter, a custom mouse cursor (a cartoon beaver with his arm as the pointer), the eternal under-construction.gif and most importantly: a splash page with a ginormous button that read “MOJO” in all caps. I don’t have these files anymore and, despite the popular saying, the internet forgot all about it. But here’s a realistic recreation of that button:

At this point I should clarify that “MoJo” was my online handle — my first name being Moritz and my middle name being Johannes. Go ahead and laugh, I’ll wait.

I remember using PaintShop Pro 5 to make the graphic, the markup probably looked a lot like this (back then HTML tags were written uppercase because it made them seem very important):

There are a few notable things about this button when you look at it in a 2019 context: Yes, it’s ugly and red. It’s not accessible at all (we’ll talk about why later), you definitely could improve the markup, and the label is rather cryptic. But oh boy does it beg to be clicked! Since that’s the only navigational option my visitors had at this point, I think I did a good job. What’s more tempting than to press the big red button?

Over the years web trends and technologies have come and gone but some things haven’t changed. How cool is it, that the code I wrote in 1998 would still perfectly render in any modern browser? To this day, buttons remain the UI designer’s best friend when the user should be called to an action*. In 1998 this implementation was totally fine. Nowadays, not so much.

TL;DR: building for the web isn’t easy anymore. As a novice, be thankful for the wrong paths your predecessors took, so you can do better now. As a senior netizen, be kind to those who still learn. The web is pretty complicated these days.

Buttons are the perfect example for that.