1994: Cool Site of the Day and the rise of curated web design
Although the Web is technically limited in 1994, it is a fast-growing network and so curation quickly becomes a design problem. Enter Glenn Davis and his website, Cool Site of the Day.
On August 10, 1994, a 33-year old web enthusiast named Glenn Davis posted the following announcement to a UseNet mailing list:
"Need a daily web fix of something new? Try The Cool Site of the Day. Every night at midnite the Cool Site of the Day gets set to point at a new Cool Site. You'll never know what's there until you take the link so expect to be surprised."
By day, Davis was a project manager at an internet service provider (ISP) called InfiNet, based in Norfolk, Virginia. He'd started the site after his boss had told him, “Wouldn’t it be great if you had a place to show everyone all the cool things you find?” As Davis told the story many years later, on his short-lived 2022 website, Verevolf:
"I mean, challenge accepted. I went back to my office and created Cool Site of the Day. Then I came back to talk about it. I really expected he wouldn’t let me run with it, but he did. But InfiNet was very specific in that I had to make it very clear that CSotD was entirely my work and not associated with InfiNet."
CSotD (pronounced see-sought-dee) consisted of just two web pages at this point. The front page, cool.html on the infi.net website, was the daily site pick. The other page was an archive.
We don't have any screenshots of what CSotD looked like in August 1994, but according to Davis it was nothing special:
"So when I launched it, August 4, 1994, the web was grey. Literally. There is no archive of the net prior to 1996 so most of the designs are lost. Not that many of them were great designs. The link on the initial site was a picture I took off a stock art CD I had of a mountain scene from the Himalayas."
Since the Web at this time wasn't very "designable" (to use his wording), the initial sites Davis chose "were primarily picked for showing new things or possibilities." The list of sites he selected in that first month included The Tori Amos Home Page, Le WebLouvre, San Francisco Examiner, Future Fantasy Bookstore, The Froggy Page, Virtual Chevrolet, and The Monty Python Page. So it was a mix of fan sites, experimental art pages, academic playgrounds, and very early commercial sites.
Editorial web design
It didn't take long for Davis' website to become popular, partly because this was the era of the web directory — Yahoo had launched earlier in 1994, but we were still several years away from quality search engines. Perhaps the closest thing to CSotD when it launched was Mozilla's 'What's New' page, but that was presented as a plain list of links. By focusing on just one website per day on CSotD, and at the same time building an archive, Davis was bringing a sense of exploration and serendipity to the Web.
According to an introductory post on Verevolf, Davis didn't necessarily see himself as a web designer. He calls himself "the first web design critic and a major web design influencer in the 1990’s at the beginnings of the World Wide Web."
The "influencer" label is partly due to his later role as a founding member of the the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998, alongside Jeffrey Zeldman and others. But Davis also represents a turning point in the early history of web design itself. Whereas GNN's Jennifer Niederst Robbins was fundamentally a visual designer, concerned with how web pages looked, Davis worked at the editorial layer — shaping how people discovered and navigated the early Web.
On his 2022 website, Davis also noted that he has "high functioning Autistic Syndrome Disorder," a condition he was unaware of in the 1990s. This is why he become "hyper-focused" on the Web in 1994, he reflected.
Like most other website pioneers, Davis credits the Mosaic browser for introducing him to the Web. He'd already built a Gopher server for his ISP employer, and soon after he was shown Mosaic. "It was early 1994 and that was the moment my autistic obsession with the web began," he wrote in April 2022.
What's cool?
Because the Web was so new in 1994, CSotD gained traction as other curious people checked the site out. If you were an early Web user, it was likely you were just visiting a few sites per session due to the slow dialup internet connections of the time.
"If you only had a few minutes to take a look at something new on this cool new web thing, you needed a filter," Davis later wrote. "If the filter was daily, better yet."
What was "cool" was an arbitrary decision, though. According to a 2014 analysis by Megan Sapnar Ankerson, an associate professor in communications and media at the University of Michigan, Davis' selections were completely subjective:
"Browsing the archive of Cool Sites selected in 1994, one might surmise that the element of surprise is partly related to the vast range of content that is featured—a hodgepodge so arbitrary that it appears hard to draw out any defining characteristics of cool."
But it was a formula that worked. By the end of 1994, CSotD was getting 10,000 visits a day and then 20,000 per day within a year of its launch. By that point, Davis had become "a Web celebrity, giving interviews to online magazines and fending off gifts from Webmasters who were desperately seeking his recommendation of their sites."
The punk ethos of web design
It wasn't just web browsing that Davis encouraged with CSotD. Even though he himself wasn't a designer, his belief was that anyone could design a web page. There was a punk spirit to this — you don't have to be a professional, just open up your browser and copy what you see. In a 1999 interview with his WaSP cofounder Jeffrey Zeldman (who was a professional designer), Davis said that "anyone can build a great website."
"That's my belief," he continued. "It just takes a bit of guidance and access to understandable knowledge. That word 'understandable,' it's important. You don't introduce people to website building by using geek-speak. You have to talk human to human..."
My punk comparison doesn't quite stand up when you consider all the technical knowledge you needed in 1994 to even connect to the Web — let alone publish something. I'm not sure Sid Vicious would've been able to start a website! Nevertheless, enough amateur designers published a web page in 1994 that there was a kind of beautiful chaos to the Web, even if it was still only about 10,000 sites in total.
As for surfing the Web at this time, it was undeniably exciting — yet also confusing and intimidating. Similar perhaps to going to a punk rock concert in the late-1970s. As Ankerson described it in her article:
"Testimonies from the web users of 1994 describe the experience of jumping around the network as one of intense dislocation, both thrilling and excruciating."
Ankerson later published a book entitled Dot-com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web. She made the point that despite the technical limitations of Web publishing in 1994, a lot of the appeal of the early Web was due to the personality that a website could convey. Fun was expressed "not just in the pleasure of gift economies," she wrote, "but through a site’s 'personality,' its voice, tone, attitude, and direct, informal mode of address."
Even if web design in 1994 was limited to a smattering of HTML tags and almost no layout mechanisms, the best websites expressed their author's personality and provided a sense of joy to web users who stumbled over them — often via CSotD.
Curation as a design feature
Davis' website that curated other websites would become increasingly popular as the Web continued to expand. CSotD also became a blueprint for later curation sites, like Boing Boing and Kottke.org. But even back in 1994, at least one person wondered why there needed to be a central curation hub at all. Why couldn't websites curate themselves?
In December 1994, Denis Howe, a PhD student from Imperial College in London, created a web page called EUROPa — an acronym for "Expanding Unidirectional Ring Of Pages." The goal was to provide "a different way to connect up and explore the World-Wide Web."
For a web user, the concept was very simple: after you had finished reading the web page you were on, you would click the large, bold link near the top of the page entitled "Next EUROPa page." Do the same on the next page, and et cetera until you've had your fill of browsing.
If you were a website author, EUROPa was a very manual process. It involved you copying and pasting some source code from the originating page, then emailing the owner of that page so they can add your link as "Next EUROPa page." The next person would do the same, but using your page as the origin. The most recent person to join would link to Howe's page, hence it was a "ring" of websites.
The following year, a teenager named Sage Weil automated Howe's idea using a CGI script and launched Webring.com, a service eventually acquired by Geocities.
By the end of 1994, though, with sites like Davis' Cool Site of the Day, Yahoo! (still on a University domain), and now Howe's EUROPa, there were multiple ways to discover new web pages — beyond Mosaic and Netscape's 'What's New' pages. This meant that curation was now a big part of web design; if you were a site author, you had to think about how your site would be discovered, especially as the Web continued to grow and your website became one of many thousands.
In the next post, we'll come to a tipping point in web design: 1995, when the Web is rapidly expanding and the ways to make your website stand out are expanding too.
Buy the Book
My Web 2.0 memoir, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution, is now available to purchase:
- Paperback, US$19.99: Amazon; Bookshop.org
- eBook, US$9.99: Amazon Kindle Store; Apple Books; Google Play
Or search for "Bubble Blog MacManus" on your local online bookstore.