William T. Verts has one of those university homepages that looks old because it never had a reason to become anything else. It is a personal index, teaching shelf, software cabinet, and bookmark collection built with the assumption that a Web page should mostly help you get somewhere.
Visit William T. Verts’s homepage
Verts is a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his site has been online since at least 1999. The design is the interesting part precisely because it barely tries to be design: ordinary HTML, simple navigation, a GIF image map, and long lists of links organized by subject.
That restraint was deliberate. Verts has written about abandoning visual page-building tools because correcting their generated HTML took more effort than writing the page directly. The result is a site that skipped several generations of Web fashion by never depending on them in the first place.
The useful material goes much deeper than the homepage. Old course pages survive. Technical explanations such as his notes on byte order have been cited elsewhere for years. His software section offers programs he wrote himself under extremely permissive terms: use them, copy them, give them away, just keep the related files together. Among the artifacts is exactly the sort of thing a late-1990s personal software page should contain: a utility for counting down the days until January 1, 2000.
The site also exposes something modern faculty pages tend to erase. This is not a polished institutional profile assembled from a database. It is Verts’s own collection of interests, classes, software, links, opinions, and accumulated references. The structure tells you something about the person because one person actually structured it.
For webmasters, that is the useful lesson. A page built around durable URLs, plain HTML, and comprehensible navigation can survive longer than entire generations of frameworks. It does not need a redesign every three years to remain legible.
CacheRat’s larger 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of sites that survived by accident. This one feels more like survival by refusing unnecessary complexity.