c/90s-web-design

Found a Geocities page from 1997 with a 10MB animated GIF, debate: were bloated files worth the vibe?

I stumbled on an old Geocities shrine to Sailor Moon that had a 10MB animated GIF of spinning sparkles loading for 5 minutes on dial-up. Some people say big files killed early web creativity, but others argue the slow build-up made the content hit harder. What side are you on, did the wait make it better or just frustrate everyone?

Saturday morning spent digging through an old Angelfire archive changed my mind about modern web design

I used to think all those 90s sites with tiled backgrounds and blinking text were just a joke. But last Saturday I pulled up an old Angelfire archive from 1997 that someone had preserved. This one fan site for a band I loved back then was still fully intact with a starry background and MIDI player. The layout was simple but everything worked. No loading spinners, no cookie banners, no 3 different scripts blocking the page. It loaded in under 2 seconds on my slow connection. That got me thinking about how we traded speed and straightforwardness for all these fancy frameworks. Now I'm actually looking at old HTML books again. Has anyone else found an old site that made you reconsider how we build pages today?

TIL my old Geocities site was more honest than my current portfolio

Had coffee with an old college buddy last week and he brought up my old Geocities page from 1998. He remembered the sparkly star cursor and the MIDI file that auto-played every time you loaded the page. But what hit me was when he said that site felt more like me than the polished portfolio I have now. I spent hours on that old thing just figuring out HTML tables and picking animated gifs that matched my mood. It was messy and full of typos but it had personality. My current design work is clean and professional but something got lost along the way. Has anyone else felt like their old school sites had more soul than the modern ones?

Pro tip: the best day I ever had running a 90s site was when my counter hit 500 visitors

Back in 1998 I ran a little fansite for a forgotten DOS game called "Crystal Caves." I had a visitor counter from WebCounter and it sat at like 12 for months. Then one random Tuesday I checked and it was 487. Then 503. I almost fell out of my chair. Turns out some guy on a forum linked to my page about secret level codes. But here's the debate: does getting a big spike from one link feel better than slow steady growth from search engines? I had both that week and the spike was electric but the steady traffic made my site feel alive longer. What do you all think matters more for a personal site? The thrill of a big day or the quiet grind of daily visits?

I finally figured out how to make a tableless layout using only float and clear in a 1997 HTML guide

Spent 3 hours last night trying to get three columns to sit next to each other without tables, and an old tutorial from a GeoCities page about CSS hack with float left finally clicked, has anyone else had that 'aha' moment with a decades old trick?

Talked to an old webmaster at a diner who still runs his 1997 site on a single Geocities page

Geocities guestbook from 1998 taught me how to fix my own HTML

I was tinkering with my old Angelfire site last weekend and a broken image link in the guestbook made everything look like garbage for like an hour. Turns out I had typed the path wrong and a simple slash fix got it working again. Anyone else still keep their old site files around just in case?

Just realized you can right-click any old Geocities page to view the source and grab those embedded MIDI files easily

I spent hours trying to download a specific .mid from a fan site about Sonic 2 last night before I remembered the view source trick and now I have a little library of 90s game tunes saved on my desktop.

My old Geocities site vanished overnight and I lost 3 years of work

I used to run a fan page for a local band called The Rusted Rails back in 1998, hosted on Geocities. Two weeks ago I tried to dig it up for a nostalgia trip and the whole thing was just gone, no forwarding address or anything. I had custom MIDI files and a guestbook with over 200 entries from people in my town of Spokane. It bums me out that so much of that old web stuff just vanished with no warning. Anyone else lose an old page they wish they could see again?

I finally chose between a GeoCities guestbook and a simple contact form

I was rebuilding my old band's website from 1998 and had to pick between keeping the GeoCities guestbook with all those animated GIFs or swapping in a plain contact form. I went with the guestbook because it just felt RIGHT for the era, even though it takes forever to load. Has anyone else had to decide between pure nostalgia and making a retro site actually work?

Swapped a table-based layout for CSS grids on a 90s site rebuild and the difference was night and day

I was working on restoring my old Geocities tribute page last month, it had this massive nested table structure that took forever to load on dial-up. Switched to a basic CSS grid with fixed width columns and the page rendered in like 2 seconds instead of 15. The old tables were a nightmare for alignment too, everything shifted if you resized the browser. Has anyone else noticed how much smoother old site content works with modern layout tricks?

Question about the old Geocities animated gif explosion

I was digging through my old hard drive last weekend and found a folder of Geocities pages I made back in 1997. The difference between my first page with nothing but plain text and my final page with 30 spinning gifs and a starfield background was wild, all within about 8 months of learning basic HTML from a book. Has anyone else gone back and compared their early ugly sites to their later slightly less ugly ones?

That Geocities archive site blew my mind with one stat

I was digging through the Internet Archive's Geocities collection last night, looking for old fan pages from 1997. Turns out there were over 38 million user-created pages on Geocities before Yahoo shut it down. I had no idea it was that massive, I figured maybe 10 million tops. Anybody else ever get lost in those old neighborhood directories like Area51 or WestHollywood?

Does anyone remember when web rings were actually useful for finding niche stuff?

I was looking for old skate videos the other day and kept hitting random pages about 90s skate culture. Back then you could find a web ring on a fan site and jump between like 30 similar sites in a row. Now everyone just says "web rings were clunky" but I found some of my favorite bands that way. Anyone else miss just clicking through site after site without an algorithm deciding what you see?

Hit 50 bookmarks on my old Geocities page and it totally surprised me

I keep a 1997 Geocities site about punk show flyers that I thought nobody even looked at anymore. Last week I checked the guestbook and saw someone from Portland, Oregon left a message about a show I went to in '98. That made me realize I had 50 bookmarks from people who actually use the site regularly. It changed my mind about keeping it online because I figured it was just digital junk nobody cared about.

My hit counter stopped working on my GeoCities page last night

I had this old-fashioned hit counter on my Angelfire site, the kind that starts at zero and goes up. It was at 1,247 hits after two years, which felt huge to me. Then last night, I go to check it and the number is frozen on 1,248. The image in the GIF just sits there not moving, like it's dead. Anyone else had a hit counter stick like that, or is this a sign I need to switch to a fresh script?

Tried replicating a GeoCities page layout from 1998 using pure CSS and it took me 3 hours to realize tables were actually easier

Spent all afternoon fighting flexbox to get that neon green text over a tiled star background to line up right and finally gave up and used a table layout like the original and it worked in 5 minutes, has anyone else found modern tools just overcomplicate the old look?

Made my own marquee tag using JavaScript - surprisingly worked better than I thought

I wanted that old-school scrolling text look on my retro site, but the marquee tag kept glitching in modern browsers. So I wrote a tiny script to animate text across the screen, and it actually runs smoother than the original. Has anyone else found a weird workaround that ended up being more reliable than the old HTML tag?

TIL my Geocities site had a broken hit counter for 6 months

Was digging through an old hard drive last week. Found my Angelfire site from 1998. The hit counter only showed 47 visitors. Thought nobody ever saw it. But then I checked the server logs from a backup. Turns out the counter script broke after the first week. Probably had like 400 people stop by. The guestbook was full of comments I never responded to. Feeling pretty stupid now. Anyone else ever find out their old site was more popular than they thought?

Everyone praises the Space Jam website but I found it impossible to navigate

Back in 1997, I spent an entire afternoon trying to find the game downloads on that site, and the random image map links kept taking me to movie trivia instead. Am I the only one who thought the design was more flashy than functional?

Spent 6 hours trying to fix a background tile that wouldn't repeat properly in Netscape 4

I was building a little fan site for an old band I liked back in '98 and spent almost an entire Saturday trying to get a gif background to tile seamlessly. Turned out the image had a single pixel border on one edge that I missed because I was zoomed in too far on my monitor. Has anyone else ever lost a whole day to something that dumb with old browsers?

Warning: Staring at a 90s site through a modern browser ruins the whole vibe

I used to think Mosaic and Netscape were just old junk until I loaded up Space Jam on an actual Windows 95 machine at a friend's garage sale. The pixel font and cursor lag made the whole experience feel alive instead of just flat. Has anyone else tried viewing these sites on original hardware instead of emulators?

That time a Geocities fanatic called my layout 'too corporate'

I was showing off my new Angelfire page in an IRC channel back in 97 and this guy named PixelPunk42 goes off on me. He said my layout looked like a bank website and had no soul. I told him I spent 3 hours on the tile background and he just laughed. Then he sent me his page with a flaming skull gif and a guestbook that had 200 entries. I felt like a total poser after that. Anyone else get roasted by the old school HTML purists back then?

Hot take: dropping $80 on a 90s style guestbook script was either genius or stupid for my retro site

I paid like $80 to some guy on a Geocities forum back in 2005 for a custom Perl guestbook script that looked like it was from 1997 with blinking text and a hit counter. It saved my site because everyone loved signing it and I got like 500 messages in a month before spambots ruined it. But now I think it was a total waste because free alternatives like cgi-bin hacks existed and the script had a bug that deleted every 50th entry. Has anyone else spent cash on old school web features that either paid off or bombed out on them?

My niece called my favorite old site 'broken' and it stung

She was looking at my bookmarked 'Space Jam' movie site from 1996 and said the animated construction gif and tiled background meant the page didn't load right. It hit different because she's never known a web that wasn't slick and perfect. Does anyone else get sad that this whole aesthetic is just lost on people now?