
Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign - bdz
http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm
======
pzaich
Found this gem on the news page <http://www.dolekemp96.org/praug296.htm>

> "There's no doubt we'll look back at Web sites today and basically say ...
> that they were quite primitive. They don't customize what they present to
> the viewers' interests. They don't remember: Have you been there before?
> What have you seen before? And that's got to change." -- Bill Gates, MSNBC,
> July 15, 1996

How right he was!

------
ten4backdoor
Total badass. A few months ago I saw a gallery of screenshots taken from
'wayback machine' of a whole bunch of old websites. Netflix, Dell, and Apple
look COMPLETELY different. What's surprising (or maybe not) is that Amazon 7
years ago looks almost exactly the same. Thanks for sharing the Dole / Kemp
campaign site - brings back fond memories. Heres's the gallery if you're
interested... [http://www.shopify.com/blog/6464492-the-ecommerce-
graveyard-...](http://www.shopify.com/blog/6464492-the-ecommerce-graveyard-
how-37-popular-sites-used-to-look)

------
sequoia
from the commercials page (
<http://www.dolekemp96.org/news/commercials/commercials.html> ), in reference
to the bad Clinton economy that Dole would fix:

    
    
        Two incomes needed to make ends meet.
    

Not sure whether to laugh or to cry, thinking that just a while ago a
politician called attention to this as though it were a fixable problem...were
things really so different 16 years ago?

~~~
Spooky23
Yup.

Lots more blue-collar jobs with pensions. '96 was 'pre-China' for more
sophisticated manufacturing.

------
rangibaby
This is quite nice for a 1996 website. I guess it shows how much the
development of (nice) web design was held back by a combination of the ~2000
flashpocalypse and IE6.

I felt quite nostalgic looking at the designs from this era:
<http://www.4president.us/2000websites.htm>

Luckily, there is a certain font present that will stop you from feeling _too_
sentimental. :-)

~~~
acuozzo
Also: <http://www.4president.us/1996websites.htm>

------
dan_yall
Well done, and not all that dated looking.

Although, in my head, everything on that website reads in the voice of Norm
MacDonald's Bob Dole impression.

~~~
manuscreationis
I thought I was the only one...

------
ssharp
There is a link at the bottom of the page to:

<http://www.4president.org/>

This site has archives of campaign websites, website features, and campaign
ads.

I think it's fascinating to see the paradigm shifts in web design indicated by
these four-year gaps. And campaigns being a temporary thing, I think they
perfectly encapsulate the design of the "era". I was going through the years
and was thinking "sure, a lot changed from 1996 to 2000, so of course the
sites will look a lot different but there is no way 2008 is that much
different than 2012". Wrong. I think this is just what happens when you see
web design evolve slowly over four years -- you don't think it's changed that
much. Then you actually see a site in 2008 vs. 2012 and realize the
difference.

The 1996 Phil Graham and Pat Buchanan sites look like classic Geocities-style
design!

The stark differences in design of the nominated candidates vs. the ones who
lost in the primaries. This gap seems to have been most apparent in 1996 and
2000, during the bubble, when top-tier web designers were probably insanely
expensive.

~~~
tharris0101
I think the biggest aesthetic change was between 04 and 08 which makes sense
sine that was the era that so-called "Web 2.0" took off.

------
imjared
Bit of mudslinging going on about a "clipper chip." I was much too young to
really know what was going on with this (can read up on it here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip>), but it's interesting to see that
there were security concerns in 1996 similar to the ones we have in 2012.
<http://www.dolekemp96.org/agenda/issues/internet.htm>

~~~
neilk
That's a good thing for today's hackers and activists to review. It shows the
long-term agenda of the government in wanting to have ubiquitous surveillance
powers. And it shows you can win some of these battles.

Can you imagine a web without SSL? Today people openly call for all sites to
do https all the time, but in the 90s, a web server (or even a web _browser_ )
that could do https in a non-broken fashion was officially a dangerous
munition. To do this basic thing you had to cobble some open source software
together, kind of like how people do it with ffmpeg and implementations of
closed-source codecs today.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_United_States)

------
freehunter
Blocked by McAfee Web Gateway as pornography. Interesting.

~~~
pokstad
Same here. Now I'm going to get fired. Thanks HN.

------
robocaptain
One way it reads very different to me is the way all of the sources are (in
parenthesis) directly after the statements. I don't read a lot of campaign
websites but I've not seen one that has so many direct sources for this many
statements.

It's quite refreshing actually.

------
wallawe
"DEBATE MENTION OF WEB SITE CAUSES FLOOD OF VISITORS"

Goes on to say that the site received more than 762,000 "hits" in a four hour
period:

<http://www.dolekemp96.org/news/releases/proct0796a.htm>

edit: hours

~~~
artursapek
It says four hours, not days.

------
DrinkWater
hooray for <http://www.dolekemp96.org/about/cookies/cookies.html>

~~~
tronicron
Cookie recipe! #winning

------
tmgrhm
Complete with the security of '96: <http://www.dolekemp96.org/divider.gi>
[Intentionally broken link]

~~~
Firehed
>
> \\\brainiac.ad.safesecureweb.com\websites\192620cbc\dolekemp96.org\divider.gi

Safesecureweb.com. Heh.

Although other than knowing it's running IIS (which is in the Server header of
the responses anyway), it's not particularly useful. Unlike modern web apps,
it's not displaying a stack trace or debug information that contains db
connection strings and the like.

Also, this is fixed by changing one line in web.config AFAIK (it's been a good
five years since I worked with IIS in any capacity)

------
mochizuki
"Bill Clinton Wants to Put 'Big Brother' in Your Computer"

Haha!

<http://www.dolekemp96.org/agenda/issues/internet.htm>

~~~
danesparza
Actually, this was a pretty big deal to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
back in the day. More information:
<https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Key_escrow/Clipper/>

------
marshray
<http://www.dolekemp96.org/news/releases/proct0796a.htm> "DEBATE MENTION OF
WEB SITE CAUSES FLOOD OF VISITORS -- Site Receives More Than 762,000 Hits in
Single Four-Hour Period Today"

------
danso
I was going to ask: " _so how is it that the average non-commercial site can
be expected to crash upon reaching ten HN upvotes but this 1996 is still
chugging along strong_ " After all, this was well before such thing as CDNs
were in wide use.

Then I looked at the source and saw that it's a Frontpage site.

* This brings back memories of when you could get at least $50/hr to make something like this.

~~~
brazzy
The average non-commercial site these days is based on an unoptimized
Wordpress installation that loads 137 PHP files and does 18 DB reqests to
render its main page. This 1996 gem is entirely static content. That's a few
orders of magnitude less work for the server to do right there. And it runs on
IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most
definitely NOT from 1996.

~~~
derleth
> And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual
> work is most definitely NOT from 1996.

And this is the big thing right here. We're running sites designed to be
basically usable when served by 1996 hardware on systems orders of magnitude
faster with almost two decades' worth of optimizations compared to what was
acceptable in 1996. I don't know how much NTFS has changed since then, but
filesystems in the Linux world have undergone a sea change in that timeframe,
which is directly relevant to how quickly a static page can be served.

~~~
Firehed
I imagine the only real thing at play here is the number of connections the
server software is configured to handle. This site has a small handful of
small static assets: there's no server-side render, and I'd put money on
everything being cached even if no such server-side optimizations have been
made (done at the disk and/or OS level).

I'd bet the only limiting factor of '96 hardware would be the NIC, all else
being equal. Webserver software was a lot less complicated back then, so its
memory footprint was far smaller.

------
joaco
I'm loving this language

"Believe that? America can do better. Bob Dole. Jack Kemp. Cutting income
taxes on every family 15%. A 500 dollar per child tax credit. Higher take home
pay. Bob Dole. Cut taxes. Balance the budget. Raise take home pay. Tell the
truth."

------
cedricd
What's interesting to me about these old sites is how bad the typography is.
Why is it that sites started using decent typefaces only relatively recently?
Print design was just as well understood back then.

------
DoubleMalt
Looks like the high school homepage I did in 1994 when in 10th grade ;)

------
jdalgetty
It's nice how quickly everything loads.

~~~
samwilliams
It loads quickly now, but at 75kb on a 28k dial up modem that would have taken
~21 seconds!

------
awwstn
I wonder if they took online donations through the site. I see the donations
link, but maybe it gave a phone number/address rather than a cc form.

------
systematical
Awesome. Another internet time capsule!

------
yuvadam

        <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">
    

I rest my case.

------
boh
My work computer categorized the site as pornography

Access Denied!

~~~
vraylle
Ditto, hope the men in suits don't come down.

------
brown9-2
Makes you wonder who, if anyone, is still paying to host the site. Someone
must be keeping it online on purpose, right?

~~~
michaelt
Domain whois shows it's registered to "4President Corporation" and it shares a
host with <http://4president.org/> with provider 'hostmysite'.

Looks like this is someone's intentional effort to archive these things.

~~~
cpeterso
Was dolekemp96.org the original website? whois says the domain was registered
in 2003 and archive.org first crawled the site in 2001.

Domain Name:DOLEKEMP96.ORG Created On:27-May-2003 14:15:22 UTC Last Updated
On:25-Jan-2012 00:36:47 UTC

~~~
Firehed
If the domain lapses and is re-sold (not just transfered, but actually deleted
and re-created), you can expect to see the newer created time.

It could also be the registrar serving up wacky WHOIS info.

------
spinchange
"Like no President since Lincoln, he will bring to the Presidency the values
and principles of all Americans."

Politicians have always and will always make great claims and comparisons and
appeals to authority, history, etc., but I can't imagine a modern campaign (on
either side) just flat our saying our guy is the best thing since Lincoln.

~~~
brudgers
I can't imagine a Republican of recent years running on this sort of
environmental record:

<http://www.dolekemp96.org/agenda/issues/environment.htm>

Then again, I increasingly have trouble imagining a Democrat doing so, either.

I miss the World War II veterans in U.S. politics.

~~~
scarmig
Or this:

<http://www.dolekemp96.org/agenda/issues/civil.htm>

And today far too many people are salivating at the idea of gutting the Voting
Rights Act.

On the other hand, one of the longest pages is on the drug war (in support of
extending and intensifying it). It's hard to imagine a Republican making that
a central plank in their platform, either.

------
xyzzyb
Ahh, 1996 was an awesome year for websites.

Space Jam: <http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/>

~~~
napoleoncomplex
I've always wondered, what's the best looking website of the 1990s? Was there
anything that people would deem as "good" as some of today's top designs?

I feel like there had to be at least someone with a very refined sense of
aesthetic making awesome websites back then.

~~~
dccoolgai
Drudge Report. Even if you don't like the political "lean" of it (I,
personally, don't), you have to appreciate a design that has (basically)
stayed the same since it was founded in the mid 90s. The "minimalism" from
Drudge had a big impact on a lot of modern web design.

~~~
iomike
trust me, drudge's minimalism didn't influence modern web design.

~~~
dccoolgai
There are quite a few people

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-
is...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-
the-best-designed-sites-on-the-web)

who disagree with you

[http://dailycurrant.com/2012/04/23/matt-drudge-wins-web-
desi...](http://dailycurrant.com/2012/04/23/matt-drudge-wins-web-designs-
highest-honor/)

~~~
meej
daily currant is a satire site.

------
tocomment
So what is it about this design that makes it look "dated"?

It's not just the grainy images, right? Is it the smaller text? More compact
style?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I was thinking it holds up quite well, compared to my subjective memory of
websites from that vintage. There are no scrolling banners or other dancing
garbage (with the exception of one animated GIF that is relatively
restrained), and the layout wouldn't look out of place today if the elements
had a bit more room to breathe.

Even the markup is surprisingly clean:

* Most tag names are lowercase

* Attributes are double-quoted

* Some style attributes with CSS

I'm surprised to see FrontPage generated this code - I remember it being more
gnarly than this. That said, I'm enjoying the historical artifacts:

* Table-based layout

* <font> tags

* <body> tag has background, vlink and alink attributes

* URLs apparently map to actual HTML files

~~~
Maakuth
The tightness of the layout probably stems from low resolution screens. In '96
the most typical display size was something around 640x480 or 800x600, not a
lot of room to breathe there.

~~~
atsaloli
In the last month, I've had 2 people tell me (unsolicited of course) that my
website looks like it was made 10 years ago.

I went to this 1996 campaign site and said with dismay, it looks like my
website.

I recognized many of of the above historical attributes (table-based layout,
centered narrow, body bgcolor attribute) in my own site.

I've got a full-time job as a UNIX system administrator, and a part-time
business training sys admins. I don't have the website redesign merit badge or
time to earn one. I'd pay for a redesign but I don't even know what to ask for
except "a website that presents my company well". And I want people to stop
staring at my website like there is something wrong with it.

Would appreciate any help you can offer, either by recommending a designer or
a design, please.

~~~
eric_bullington
If you don't mind looking a bit like other sites, I'd highly recommend using
bootstrap as a basis for a modern-looking redesign. You can customize it to
your will, or even buy some bootstrap-based layouts to work with for not much
money: <https://wrapbootstrap.com/>

As someone who learned table-based layouts and who now designs using HTML5 and
CSS3, rest assured that the "new" web is not that hard to learn as long as you
understand the basics of css. And almost all your JavaScript skills will
transfer. It's really as easy as picking up a book on HTML5 and reading it.
Alternately, check out: <http://diveintohtml5.info/>

~~~
aw3c2
by the looks of it, bootstrap heavily relies on javascript on pretty much
everything. is that just my first (bad) impression or actually true?

------
MatthewPhillips
I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font
size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And
if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to
see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took
2ms to render and 4ms to paint.

I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in
fact most do not. Compare this site with a random page from the ReadWrite's
new design[1] which doesn't even load its initial content until after the page
has loaded (!) and gives 50% of its x axis to ads and links to other unrelated
pages on the site (which contain more ads of course).

I _don't want_ informational websites to continue to load stuff a second or
five seconds after the page has loaded. I don't want them to load new content
when my mouse floats over a div. I don't want a sitemap that is omnipresent as
I scroll down an article.

I'm a big fan of the Contrast Rebellion[2] and kind of feel like something in
the same spirit is needed for static websites. I miss the non-interactive web.

[1][http://readwrite.com/2012/11/14/if-foxconn-replaced-its-
huma...](http://readwrite.com/2012/11/14/if-foxconn-replaced-its-humans-with-
robots-would-you-feel-better) [2]<http://contrastrebellion.com/>

~~~
Random_Person
I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I
need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update
links and I'm only at <50 pages!

~~~
stdbrouw
Lots of static-site generators to choose from. Jekyll's the most popular
choice. Link: <http://jekyllrb.com>

~~~
gee_totes
Since you mentioned Jeckyll, I also want to mention Octopress, which is based
on Jeckyll <http://octopress.org/>

