I am just wondering what happened to all the little widgets/features we used to have on our websites
back in the day such as enter pages, guestbooks, polls (which I guess are still around to some extent), visitor/hit counters etc?
I’m guessing the enter pages are SEO related and probably not really needed at all.
Guestbooks always seemed a nice way of seeing where visitors came from and their comments.
I guess hit counters may seem a bit redundant in a way as a lot of them were probably inaccurate.
I was just thinking about the good days and what happened to all these things!
I seem to think there was a reason why they were once popular and also a reason why they went out of fashion. But now I think of it, I can’t remember those reasons.
I imagine they got increasingly bombarded by bot spam, to the point that managing them was more trouble than it was worth.
I think like a lot of things in the “old school” web it was one of those things that people put there “because they can”, then becuse people did it, it became the done thing, so more felt it necessary and followed.
But over time, like with animated gifs, webmasters matured and no longer saw any practical need for such things.
