How the web has changed (II)

I have archive copies of my personal website going back to about 2007. I've recently been looking back at these old sites, mostly out of nostalgia, but also because I'm curious about what has changed. Of course, we all know how "the web" has changed, and mostly not for the better. Here I'm really thinking about how site design has changed, rather than motive.

One of the things I notice is how small everything was twenty years ago, especially images. On my 2007 website, most of the images are no larger than 300x200 pixels.

I don't think we used images this size because our computers had poor graphics resolution. By 2007, the NVidia's popular GeForce 3 had been around for a couple of years, offering a resolution of 1280x720 pixels -- perhaps a bit higher if your monitor could cope. Even low-spec computers with only VGA graphics could do 640x480.

Similarly, the few audio files on my 2007 site were mono MP3s, with bit-rates as low as 32kbits/sec. Even the cheap pocket media players of the time could do much better than this.

I think everything was smaller back then mostly because of comparatively low network bandwidth. However, I also feel that site designers took a certain pride in the efficiency of their designs, something now lacking outside the "small web" movement.

I got my first ISDN Internet connection back in 2003. I remember how exciting it was, to have always-on Internet access at home. At that time, and for some years afterwards, many UK homes had only a dial-up connection. With a 56k dial-up modem, even a 300x200 image could take several seconds to transfer. If you put larger images on your website, you had to be really sure that people wanted to see them, and were willing to wait.

These days, most homes have Internet speeds measured in megabytes per second. Website designers have generally responded to this development by making everything bigger. I recently saw a website that had a full-HD background image about 5Mb in size. Even with today's broadband speeds, it can still takes several seconds to transfer an image like this.

Arguably this image, with its higher resolution, looks better on the screen that the 300x200 images of twenty years ago. In some circumstances it probably does. But does a background image need to be pin-sharp?

Improvements in technology have generally not led to websites being faster or more efficient, but to absorbing the maximum bandwidth the user will tolerate. Many sites now are slower to display than their predecessors and, frankly, look no better.

In the end, though, it might not make much difference how much effort site designers put into efficiency. Modern commercial websites are slow because they do things that users don't want, like displaying targeted advertising based on real-time bidding. Once you've got that kind of thing going on, it's almost irrelevant what content the site delivers, or how it delivers it: it's always going to be slow.

Published 2026-03-14, updated 2026-03-14

How the web has changed (II)

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