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Web Hosts’ Web Sites Are Going Stale… or I’m Hosted on a Flashy Digital Chirp Chirp Futureserver (In Space!)

Posted by Rod Armstrong, October 19th, 2006

A brief history in the Design of Web Hosts:

When the great industry that is now Web Hosting was first born out of fire, space dust, and a random sampling of prehistoric garage-based servers (around 1998, I’m guessing), the designs of web hosts were pretty boring. This is because web design as a whole was pretty boring. A great deal of design was created in Microsoft FrontPage, there was a lot of Times New Roman still floating around, there were still very welcoming splash pages and if Flash was used, it was used pretty obnoxiously.

During this era Web Host designs were utilitarian. There were servers, prideful-looking logos (think Heat and Refrigeration Supply company logos, and you have the idea) and maybe some un-ambitious stock photography of people in suits or shaking hands. The designs may have been flat, but they conveyed the information they needed to.

This all began to change around late 2001/early 2002. A few key designs landed on the scene that had the industry in an uproar. The designs were fresh and futuristic. They introduced some staples of what has now become all but the Web Hosting Standard:

• Flash: Flash was used, but not just wasted in some opening Splash page introduction. It was used more to adorn header images and create flashy introductions within a page. Now those servers once sitting next to a hosts’ logo in the background were flashing, glowing, twinkling, jetting through a wormhole, etc. And often times you would use Flash’s sound properties to give everything a nice digital chirp and a techno beat.
• Stock People: This is the year Stock Photo People really got their big chance. The requisite Stock Photo of a handshake or a shadowy data center hallway (or a globe with dollar signs all over it sitting in the Matrix or whatever) was replaced by Stock People with attitude. They were standing on servers, grinning, using laptops (flashy, glowing laptops), and really enjoying their hosting. It introduced a level of personality to hosting designs that just wasn’t there before.
• 3D Shapes: The push was now for 3D elements in designs, especially logos. There was always a 3D cube, cylinder or polygon to be found somewhere. Also, navigation buttons and overall design layouts weren’t complete until every inch was completely rounded and shaded in glorious pseudo-3D.
• Space/Future/Wireframes/Binary Code – With all of the hosting industry seemingly still infatuated with The Matrix, Hackers and The Chemical Brothers, the final touch on the next-gen designs of this time was the liberal inclusion of some kind of random, vaguely techno-ish design element. Headers, backdrops and homepages were now flying through space, lines of binary, fiber optic data, wireframe maps and 3D Cube Farms. Servers didn’t need to look like servers – they were now fully 3D rendered Futureservers made of adamantium and pulsating blue orbs. Everything was now hip, sleek and advanced.

These kinds of designs were a real push forward for Web Hosts. There was finally some imagery that tried to make hosting seem more exciting. Things were more colorful, interesting and attention-grabbing.

And, just for the record, I was never innocent of the crime of following these trends.

The problem then was that this design scheme proved to do very well for one Web Host, so it was adopted by two more. And ten more followed suit after that. And so forth. Some were created by the original masters of the movement and continued to be hallmarks of Digital Chirp Outer Space Design, and many, many more were made by imitators.

Now the problem is that a lot of the web hosting industry still hasn’t moved on from this trend. There are many variations of host design, but a fair amount of the previously mentioned Great Four Hosting Clichés above still make the rounds today. The veritable cottage craft industry that is Hosting Template manufacturers is still firmly planted in these traditions.

While the rest of the Internet has moved on to candy coated icons, bright pastels, large Arial headers and more and more whitespace, web hosting is still stuck in 2002. Now, I’m by no means suggesting that up-and-coming Web Hosts all universally adopt Web 2.0 clichés (like we did. Ahem.), but here would be my advice:

Move to more agile designs. A major issue with the 3D Space Future graphics-intensive layout is that it is very static. It’s extremely hard to change later on if you need to update something. It’s always a good idea to keep your website design flexible, so that it can accommodate future changes.

Be different. There are web hosts out there that started the whole Server-in-Space thing, and they did it well. But it’s done. Get over it. Your servers don’t need to be in Space. In fact, just about any other location in the universe is about as logical as having them in Space (aside from a data center of course, how very uncool.) Don’t copy these pervasive trends just because it worked for someone else. Think creatively and come up with your own unique look and message.

Start moving towards CSS/XHTML/Standards. As a designer who had heavily, and I do mean heavily, relied on image-intensive designs in the past, I am now a passionate Web Standards advocate. You can still say anything you want to say with complex and fancy images within a clean framework of CSS and XHTML, but the advantage is it will be easy to change later on, be compatible with all browsers, etc. The entire web is moving in this direction, so it’s also an easy way to say that you’re at least somewhere near the edge of Internet curve.

Web Hosting can be a lot of things besides Hip, Cool and Futuristic. I think a big part of this design push was how successful it was in making Web Hosting, something that is intangible and lame, seem, well, somewhat more tangible and cool. (Just imagine if your website was being stored on a futuristic fileserver in space!) But in this day and age, you don’t have to sell the service as something sexy and hip, you can sell your company that way. Though customers might not be able to visualize what hosting looks like, they don’t really need to. They need to get an impression of how you run your business. Use your website and your imagery to show the personality of the company, not the servers.

Unless of course, you actually do store your websites on polished-white, full-gloss, die-cut, cybernetic-Data-Cargo-Containers from the year 2050.

In that case, I want to host with you.

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