Old School Web Design: A "Website" That's Just A Giant Picture

This is probably the most severe old-school flashback, nearly two decades out of date.

To this day, some so-called websites are no more than a huge graphic. All of the text and images, instead of being real elements, are actually parts of a single picture displayed on the screen (a .jpg or.gif, etc.).

When the internet was new and business owners told their graphic designers to put up a web page, they'd open their desktop publishing software and export an existing brochure or other marketing piece as a picture file. Then that picture could be displayed with just a few lines of HTML. Bingo, instant website.

For example, many of the first restaurant websites were often just images of their print menu.

It was natural for this to happen. Since the field of “web design” didn’t exist, business owners called upon their graphic designers to make web pages. And since it required no more than a few clicks in the desktop publishing or illustration software they were already using, everything worked out at the time.

But be careful your web designer isn’t still using graphic design software to lay out your site’s content and then saving it as a picture file. That isn’t web design, it’s photo editing!