Windmill Web Work

The Netherlands have a long history in web design. Back in 1693, when it became a law that every windmill should have a name, the Dutch thought it would be fun if every windmill had its own ‘home page’ as well. So they started designing. Most home pages back in the day were made with quill pens on a piece of paper. Of course Google and Yahoo didn’t exist yet, so the amount of visitors was still low, also because you actually had to go to the windmill to see its home page. And once you arrived at the site, there was so much more stuff to see, that most people didn’t really care about the home page. After all, it’s more exciting to see a real windmill than to see one on paper…

Because all those ‘home page makers’ had to wait until 1989 before Tim Berners-Lee finally invented the World Wide Web, most of those early designs got lost, you know how that works with home pages and stuff.

But, just like wooden shoes, the art of making ‘home pages’ never really got forgotten. It was one of the trades that you see at a fair or when you visit a farmers market or something. There would always be an old guy sitting on a stool somewhere, drafting pages with a set of old quill pens and a bunch of different colors of ink. Of course, hyperlinks and ‘back’ buttons were not invented yet, so browsing a corporate website of let’s say the Dutch East India Company required a lot of patience and concentration. Luckily, there were no animated GIFs either.

Anyway, after HTML was invented, everything went really fast. All of a sudden, all those weird guys that used to still work as a ‘home page maker’ at fairs and such, suddenly had a real job! They started calling themselves webdesigners, and within no time they were driving around in Ferrari’s. That didn’t last long, because apparently Ferrari’s are not made to be driven while you are wearing wooden shoes. The few webdesigners that survived, started wearing Italian shoes, and from that moment on things really got going.

We all know where it went from there. If it wasn’t for those early webdesigners, you wouldn’t be looking at this website! Of course, something like the AOL – Time Warner disaster or Internet Explorer 6 wouldn’t have happened either, but that’s just a minor detail in history.