Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web Megan Sapnar Ankerson Author

From dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry In the 1990s, the World Wide Web, and the design it enabled, helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate “home pages” and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. But when the “dot-com bubble” burst in the spring of 2000, internet and web industries were demolished and hundreds of thousands of technology workers were laid off, becoming a cautionary tale of what transpires when greed, gullibility, and grossly overstated hype trump sound business decisions. In Dot-Com Design , Megan Sapnar Ankerson turns our attention instead to the ebb and flow of web design as a commercial industry, and the complex cultural work of making digital media in the socioeconomic context of the 1990s. Tracking shifts in the rules of “good web design,” Ankerson reimagines speculation and design as a series of contests and collaborations to conceive the boundaries of a new digitally networked future. What was it like to go online and “surf the Web” in the 1990s? How and why did the look and feel of the web change over time? How do new design paradigms like user-experience design (UX) gain traction? To answer these questions, Ankerson takes “dot-com” and “design” as useful conceptual frames to understand how the commercial web industry developed in the U.S. and chronicle the struggles over visions of the web and how it should look, feel, work, sound, and behave. By tracing the shifts in, and struggles over, the web’s production, aesthetics, and design this book provides a comprehensive look at the evolution of the web industry and into the vast web we browse today.