About .net

.net

.net was a British monthly magazine about the internet and, later, about professional web design and web development, published by Future plc. Launched in December 1994, when the World Wide Web was just entering public consciousness, it ran for 332 issues until June 2020, and was widely recognised as the leading print publication for web designers. In December 2013 it was rebadged simply as net, to end confusion with Microsoft's .NET Framework, and carried the tagline The voice of web design.

The magazine's twenty-five-year life traced the entire commercial history of the web in print: it began as a guide for ordinary people getting online for the first time, reinvented itself as a professional title for the people who built websites for a living, created an influential awards scheme and a conference, and closed, in the end, because of the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Launch in the Early Web Era

.net was founded in 1994, with the first issue appearing in December of that year. Its first editor was Richard Longhurst, with Ivan Pope as assistant editor, and regular contributors included Bill Thompson and Davey Winder. The magazine was aimed initially at the general internet user, in the early days of the internet and the World Wide Web gaining wider momentum, when getting online at all was a technical adventure involving modems, dial-up services and software that most households had never encountered.

That positioning could not hold for long. As the web became a mass medium at the end of the 1990s, general readers no longer needed a monthly magazine to explain it, and the commercial future of internet publishing lay with professionals. Under the editorship of Dan Oliver, .net was adapted from a consumer title into a magazine aimed at professional web designers and web developers, the identity it kept for the rest of its life.

The Professional Reinvention

The professional version of .net served the working web industry: designers and developers who built websites for clients and employers. It published tutorials, techniques, industry commentary and career and business material, and it was recognised across the industry as the premiere print publication of its kind, recommended in surveys of print magazines for web designers by bodies including Awwwards and Smashing Magazine, and sold through major retailers including Barnes & Noble in the United States.

Its audited circulation was 12,703 for January to December 2016. That figure was small beside the magazine's influence: .net was read by the people who made the web, and its judgements about tools, techniques and trends carried weight throughout the British and international design community.

Absorbing The Net

A milestone in the magazine's history came in 2001, when Haymarket Media Group closed its competing internet magazine The Net and struck a deal with Future. Haymarket sold the subscriber list and the rights to the masthead of The Net to Future in exchange for Future's football title Total Football, and Future absorbed the closed magazine into .net, which for a time carried the line that it incorporated The Net.

The swap was a shrewd piece of consolidation at the moment the dotcom market collapsed. The Net had led its sector in the last set of ABC circulation figures with sales over 51,000, but the dotcom crash and increased competition brought it down. Its absorption left .net once again as the United Kingdom's leading internet monthly, in a sector that had suddenly become much smaller.

Redesigns and Regular Features

In August 2006, with issue 152, the magazine was redesigned, gaining a themed cover design and a new internal layout. A new back-of-magazine section called Trash replaced the comics that had previously appeared. A column entitled Web Drifter, written by Martin Sargent, was introduced after the redesign but was subsequently cancelled, after readers found its issues and language vulgar. The Penny Forum section, a short humour piece drawing on surreal threads from the magazine's forum, was removed in the same redesign and reinstated from issue 153 after a large reader response.

The same period added Web Pro, a section in the latter half of the magazine written by industry professionals and divided into topics including web security, careers, search engine news and web hosting, together with a web FAQ section. The mix showed the mature magazine's character: serious professional development material, industry news, and a residue of the playful, community-driven humour of its consumer-era origins.

The Creative Bloq Connection

In 2012 Dan Oliver, the editor who had professionalised the magazine, also launched its sister publication Creative Bloq, a design-focused blog published by Future. Creative Bloq grew into a major design website, estimated to receive over two million monthly readers according to the analytics firm SimilarWeb, and selections of net magazine content were published freely on it.

The relationship foreshadowed the magazine's end. The audience for web design content had not vanished; it had moved online, where Future's own free website could reach in a month many times the readership the paid monthly magazine ever achieved. Print .net survived for eight more years as the premium, curated expression of a brand whose centre of gravity was now digital.

The Net Awards

The magazine and Future were known throughout the web development industry for the annual Net Awards, which recognised outstanding achievement in the field. The awards honoured the new talent, trends and technologies that had pushed the web forward over the previous twelve months, alongside outstanding contributions by established individuals and companies, and the judging panel was made up of notable industry veterans and thought leaders. Categories included Agency of the Year, Individual Outstanding Contribution, Developer of the Year and Best Collaborative Project, and past winners included BBC News, Dropbox, Old Spice, Flickr and the web standards advocate Jeffrey Zeldman.

The voting process began with a public nominations phase, which in 2015 alone drew over 1,000 nominee considerations. These were whittled down to ten nominees per category by the judges, followed by a public voting phase, after which the judges determined the winners, announced live at a year-end ceremony in London. The awards gave a print magazine an industry institution that long outshone its circulation figures in prestige.

The Generate Conference

In 2014 net launched Generate, a conference consisting of a single-track, two-day series of speeches and workshops presented by prominent individuals in the web design industry. The inaugural event took place in London, with Shopify and Badoo as featured sponsors; the 2015 conference was held in New York City, with Media Temple as featured sponsor.

Past speakers included Dan Cederholm of Dribbble, Jake Archibald of Google Chrome, Remy Sharp, Ethan Marcotte, the originator of responsive web design, and Elliot Jay Stocks of Adobe Typekit. Generate took the magazine's role, as a gathering point and tastemaker for the web design profession, into physical form, and demonstrated how a print brand could extend into events even as print itself declined.

Closure in 2020

Future announced in April 2020 that the magazine would cease publication for commercial reasons caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The final issue was number 332, dated June 2020, with Steven Jenkins as the magazine's last editor. The magazine's content continued to be signposted through its associated web presence at Creative Bloq, which remained the brand's online home.

The closure was widely lamented in the web design community, and commentary on the end of net magazine reflected on the future of print itself. A magazine that had explained the infant web to beginners in 1994 closed, twenty-five years later, in a world where the web it had chronicled had largely replaced print as the medium through which its own profession communicated.

Legacy

.net's legacy rests on its unique position as the web industry's own print record. For a quarter of a century it documented, month by month, how websites were designed and built, which technologies and practitioners mattered, and how a new profession defined itself, first for curious home users and then for the designers and developers who turned web work into a career.

Through the Net Awards and the Generate conference, the magazine also helped build the institutions of British web design culture. Its back run of 332 issues, from the dial-up era to the age of responsive design, remains the most complete printed chronicle of the commercial web's first twenty-five years published anywhere in Britain.