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c/90s-web-designthe_josephthe_joseph7d agoProlific Poster

Compared a 1998 GeoCities site to a modern one for a school project

I had to do a presentation on early web design for a class last month so I pulled up a retro site from 1998 on GeoCities and then tried to rebuild the same info in a modern layout. The old one had this wild tiled background, blinking text, and a guestbook that still worked somehow. It loaded faster on my laptop and felt way more fun than the clean new version I made. Has anyone else noticed these old sites just feel more alive than today's sterile pages?
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barnes.jamie
Man, my buddy dug up an old Angelfire page from 99 and the MIDI file started playing automatically, scared the crap out of both of us.
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brooke533
brooke5337d ago
You ever notice how those old pages had that weird charm where everything was just thrown together? Like I remember one site I found from 2000 that had a cursor trail of little stars, a background so busy you couldn't read the text, and a counter at the bottom that said "you are visitor number 47." It felt like someone actually cared about making it theirs, not just picking a template and moving on. The modern version I made for my project was clean and loaded fast but it just felt empty, like a waiting room or something. I bet part of it is that back then you had to put effort into making something ugly but personal, and now we all just use the same boring layouts.
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