In 1997 I started a new job as a web designer at Penton Media, a B-2-B publishing company. My first task was to redesign the website for their flagship magazine, Electronic Design.

At that time the web was new and designers were still trying to figure things out in terms of layout.

The original design is at left. At the time CD-ROMs where still a thing, using Macromedia Director and layouts still could be pretty wild. Note the two icons at bottom that appear as three-dimensional buttons, which was pretty common as well.

The redesign I did reflects what was beginning to take shape; standard navigation down one site a header for advertising and smaller ads as tiles. It’s amazing how sites have changed! Now there would be popup ads and part of the content would be hidden.

I built this design in Photoshop and I believe initially I used a program called GoLive to create the html files. Later on I would switch to BBEdit and Dreamweaver.

Of course today this design looks extremely dated (see below) — I can remember adding up the amount of space the GIF images took up! And that header image- that was considered big at the time.

I wrote some JavaScript for the drop down menu in the middle and the main navigation images where created in Strata Studio Pro.

I can’t believe it’s been twenty years since I did this!