Your old credit union website is still there…learn from it!

Look to the past and gain insights for tomorrow.

by: Joe Winn

Sounds like a telecom company’s tagline from the late 90s, right? For all I know, it could be (and my apologies for the infringement). Oddly enough, that’s part of the point. Think back to the turn of the century. Yes, we’re in the 21st, yet it still feels like someone is referencing 1900 with that line. #GrowingUpProblems In the 90s, the Internet was a thing, but not in the way a Millenial would recognize. YouTube didn’t exist. No dial-tone, no web. Wireless was Star Trek tech. Geeks like me ordered products through the web, but Amazon was only a few years old by then. The Internet was a fantastically different place. Animated GIFs were all the rage (oh, wait…), every website just had to have a weather forecast, and if you didn’t display a Netscape Now! or Get Internet Explorer box in your footer, you weren’t a proper denizen of the digital realm.

Ah, the good old days. Who doesn’t miss a little bzng-hiss every now and then? I had personal websites, the forefather of our current company used one, and they were glorious for their time. Of course, with a 28.8kbps connection (that’s 0.056% the speed of my current cable internet, or, conversely, my current connection is nearly 1,800 times faster), you had to be careful about load times. Today, if a page doesn’t load in 4 seconds, we give up. Back then, a page taking 30 seconds was normal. If you added too much, it would push a minute, or more. So, we kept it simple (but no one is taking my weather ticker!).

continue reading »