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?

3 comments

3 Comments

derek_burns20d ago

Oh man, that starfield background was peak late 90s web design.

scott.grace20d ago

Remembered finding an old Geocities site with one of those and it actually had a MIDI file of "All Star" playing in the background too. I clicked through like 5 pages just to find the guestbook was broken and half the links led to nowhere. Kinda miss how honest and weird things were back then, even if the design was a mess.

the_tara20d ago

Cracked up reading this because I went through the exact same thing with my old Geocities sites. My first one was literally just black text on a gray background with a single "under construction" gif that I thought was the coolest thing ever. Fast forward like 6 months and I had somehow figured out how to embed like 15 different spinning skull gifs and a tiled background that made your eyes bleed lmao. The best part was the guestbook that never worked and the "cool links" section that just linked to other Geocities pages that were equally broken. Looking back at that mess now is honestly painful but also kinda endearing in a weird way. I still have nightmares about that starfield background though, that thing was everywhere.