I have been around the web long enough to see more than a few website come and go. I don't mean the dot-coms, they can come and go as they like. I'm referring to independently produced web sites, be they blogs, magazines, or sites that never really fit into one category or another.
For one reason or another, these creative works have come and gone. And while the web is better off today for the time these sites were public, I sure do miss them.
Here are the top three:
Unplugged — I found Jon Wiggen’s site through the recently updated list at Moveable Type back in the early, early days — back then there were only about forty registered websites. Jon was living in Germany and his site was filled with fantastic photographs and stories of life in Hamburg. Even after he moved back to Vancouver, his site continued to entertain. Jon is also an avid gamer and a Mac fan, so he always had plenty of great links to information and unique applications. I still keep in touch with Jon via chat and email, but his website is sorely missed.
High Five — Before there was A List A Part, there was High Five. It was the Internet's first widely read web design magazine. Created by web design pioneer David Siegel, High Five was the original design magazine with site reviews, designer interviews, and feature articles on upcoming technologies that would help make the web a better medium. You can sum up the spirit of the magazine with these words found an old about page: "We don't have to remind you that a well designed web site is a rarity. We encourage designers to sweat the details in order to start banishing the garbage. Good design wins!" Classic.
What sites do you miss that have come and gone? And what do you miss about them?
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
I miss Saltyt - Supermodels are lonier than you think. Some beautiful pages at saltyt.com are gone, but some remain.
Suck, obviously... Feed and Word too
Most of the best sites live on, but I did like CDNow.com better before Amazon assimilated it.
Also, back in the day... Bluesnews.com (nothing to do with Blue's Clues) is the place for us Quake-addicts. Now it's unspecialized and overly ad-ridden.
I was sore for quite a while when AdCritic.com went the way of under-funded, high-traffic sites a couple years ago. Fortunately they came back strong with a profit model that seems to be doing well. Nowadays, any site bought out by mega-conglomerate Internet.com may as well be gone for all it matters (ClickZ, anyone?).
Correction -- make that mega-conglomerate JupiterWeb.
The old "Cool Site of the Day". I remember in the pre-Yahoo days, it was the best place to see incredible things that were being done on the web. I vaguely remember that it morphed into something called Planet Cool and then quietly went away.
CSotD still exists, although it's a pay-for-placement, spamtacular enterprise these days. Glenn Davis, originator of CSotD, left and went on to do ProjectCool, which no longer does cool site picking and is part of DevX. Wonder what happened to Glenn...he seems to have drifted away from Web design, publically anyway.
I miss David Siegel's weekly weblogesque posts over at dsiegel.com.
I miss both Siegel and Davis. Does anyone know where these guys are? I know Davis has some problems with asshats taking over his web developers community site but not sure what the story is with Dave.
Since some of you mentioned commercial properties I'll add to my list Studio Archetype. The did such wonderful and ground breaking work in their time.
Lynda Weinman's site was one of the first sites I visited in the early 90's because I was impressed with her command of the material and her way with the students, nurturing -maybe. At least 9 of us were hoping to add her class but the wait-list was too long. I didn't get in but had taken notes and visited her site and checked out her links, etc.
She had a photoshop-faded-out 'studious' photo of herself and her resume on the site (printed in her 1st book ). It was simple, clean. And just like so many design mentors had quipped about graphic design really being the business of selling real estate -her site had room to breathe. Now it's loaded densely from the get go 'top'. Very commercial.
I wish Jorn would revive robotwisdom.com. The Japanese weather simulator has been achieving a hurricane for way too long.
swanky.org