Trygg-Hansa

Trygg-Hansa is a Swedish insurance company founded in 1824.

The project

Trygg-Hansa was the first project I got to work on when I started at Icon Medialab, so it holds a special place in my heart.

I joined in December 1997, and the project was already in full swing. Icon had taken over the project from another big web agency; Spray.

The website was built in HTML, with the main site consisting of mostly static pages, and the banking section was built using ASP (the old version, not .NET).

HTML tables and transparent gifs were used for site layout, CSS did not exist yet, and there was no reason to use JavaScript for anything, the content team at Trygg-Hansa used Microsoft Frontpage to update the site, I used HomeSite though, as WYSIWYG editors were frowned upon by "real" developers.

Design

I think the Trygg-Hansa design holds up well, considering when it was built. The design was clean and the accent colors worked well together.

Curious facts

Page comments

Since there was no such thing as source control, and all data was stored in static HTML files, we had to add comments to the files to keep track of changes. Looking at the start page in wayback machine, you can see this comment:

Attribution in the footer

At this time, web firms as Icon Medialab were so "hot" that clients agreed for them to add their name to the footer of the page. This was to show off to the competition that they were the ones who created the page.