Whenever I discover a 'old' style website that is still actively maintained, I know I have found people who are prioritizing function over style. I ran across this beauty today when following a link on the Wikipedia. What OG style websites do you know about?

https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/

The site appears to have fallen over due to load. That is definitely OG.

Having had access to the web from the mid '90s I find it weird to talk about "old" as if it were a unifying style. The accessibility for making a webpage meant that there was a cambrian explosion of different styles.

If by "old" you mean "minimally styled" then there are plenty of sites from that era that were really extravagantly styled, since it was a new medium that many people were exploring. There were also plenty of sites with Java or Flash that were considerably more intrusive than sites today (not to mention the period of time between when someone realized you open as many popups as you wanted and when popup-blocker plugins appeared).

Also, this is probably me getting old, but https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/ looks quite modern to me.

I would be careful with calling that kind of design function over style. Modern UI design has its merits.

But yes, good designs are not flashy, e.g. I love the design of Astro Starlight ( https://starlight.astro.build/), a starter kit for documentation pages.

So I also took inspiration from "simple designs" for my personal site: https://bryanhogan.com/

I like simple no-frills function-first websites, but I don't consider it a good thing when an old-style website has text running across the entire width of my 1440p monitor. It's just not pleasant to read, and given that the fix is often just two CSS rules (max-width:800px;margin:auto), I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for. You can still design your website like we're in the era of 800x600 displays, but please, take the tiny step to make it play nice with larger screens too.

Hacker News itself is a good example — no JavaScript bloat, loads instantly, works on anything. I also appreciate sites where you can actually find what you came for without dismissing three popups and a newsletter signup first. As someone who came late to the internet and learned a lot from straightforward, no-frills documentation sites, I have a soft spot for anything that just gets out of the way. With that being said, It ISN"T the most eye candy friendly site. But I guess that's exactly the attraction.

Smithereen, my fediverse server software, replicates the old VKontakte desktop layout as faithfully as possible. Most functionality works without JS. Almost everything is rendered server-side. It does require a somewhat modern browser though. https://friends.grishka.me/grishka

https://isp.netscape.com

https://www.compuserve.com

http://www.catcam.com (not even https)

This one has a special place in my heart https://www.tibia.com/news/

https://www.cstrike.co.nz

I rescued the domain after it was left to expire and did my best to honour the original design from 2000.

The Cambridge list of talks at https://talks.cam.ac.uk is unbeaten.

The site loads in less than a second, you can do anything intuitively with a single click, all pages have a lot of useful information with zero fluff or clickbait.

I keep my animation portfolio pretty minimal, albeit with some fun: https://joelcares.net/

RSS (RDF Site Summary), released in 1999-2000.

Because I don't want to deal with formatting, I want to focus on data. Firefox and Safari formatting looked great.

I still maintain the Chronicles of George, which went live in Feb 2001 and whose design has more or less stayed exactly the same ever since:

https://chroniclesofgeorge.com

I eventually added proper css, bolted on https, and updated the html to something a little more modern and standards-compliant, but the site is still hand-coded, and looks pretty much the same as it has for a quarter-century.

the Japanese language school I went to which is indeed still updated: https://sokogakuen.org/

check out their directions page: https://sokogakuen.org/info.html

Where's that solar-powered website where the images are dithered

I guess it's this one https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Also like the style of Japanese websites where they seem broken/don't expand to fit available screen but cool aesthetic still

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/

My last use case for it was selling a car and giving away some free stuff. Sadly, those have been replaced by fb marketplace.

Richard Stallman's site? Very OG.

https://stallman.org/

Although I see someone has put a 1.5MB image at the top, whose intrinsic size is 2000 × 2588 px, but which was downsized to 320 × 400 px. That's not prioritizing function.

At least in 2014-2016, every important website you'd use as a student at Berkeley was old style. Starting with Telebears.

I run a personal blog at https://chadneu.com that has a pretty unique look and feel. It's a wordpress blog with a terminal style theme.

The most OG style website I actively use on a regular basis is https://www.rockauto.com

It's fast to navigate and order parts from, works on every browser I've ever tried it in, and loads very fast because there's minimal unnecessary components to the entire site. I hope they never change it :)

Here are a couple others I know about:

https://www.showcaves.com/english/index.html

https://www.hmdb.org/

mine https://omarish.com

cybernetic culture research unit

http://www.ccru.net

I doubt it's currently maintained, but these esoteric sites are fun

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

https://www.vannattabros.com/dozer.html -- A detail page from the site, not well organized but so much great info about heavy equipment and logging.

http://pouet.net

https://www.unknowncheats.me/

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