Internet as of today is, generally speaking, more visually polished. On platforms like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Bluesky/etc the users have very little influence over the layout/typography. The style is cleaner, but there’s less room for personal expression.
I remember using the view source tool on various pages that people created and tweaking it as my own. The blinking and marquee tags were littered everywhere with a green and black matrix theme. And a marijuana leaf somewhere because I was feeling edgy af. Just hacking away via brute force until I got it just right.
We’ve now pivoted back towards simplicity and boxy designs being perceived as more professional. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that simple designs are inherently better. It’s more true that the current trend was a reaction to early web design. And that pivot became reinforced by the technology changes like CSS features and the death of Flash.
- Kids making pages were in competition for status and attention (via linkbacks), so there was evolutionary pressure to be extreme
- The technology was new, there was wild experimentation and few rules in place. Look at the user interface for Kai’s Power Tools, or Bryce 3D.
- The California ideology promoted an anything-goes culture of bohemianism, antiauthoritarianism
- Skate/surf culture aesthetics
- 90s irony/slacker culture promoted eclecticism, pastiche
- Barbara Kruger-style font work
- The Memphis Group, Factory Pomo
Later in the 90s there was a push for more restrained design (no black backgrounds, no broken typewriter font, no photoshop page curl, no blink/marquee.)
MySpace in the mid-2000s had a very similar vibe. It's just normal people doing fun stuff when there are few constraints or guidelines.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970413002044/http://www8.geoci...
This person has just learned to use tables. The aesthetic is pretty mild, just a lot of glowy horizontal rules dividing text. Photoshop is mentioned. (It had no DRM, so a lot of us had Photoshop, and Kai's Power Tools, and similar software to make 3D text effects and GIFs with transparent backgrounds.)
https://web.archive.org/web/19970413015356/http://www7.geoci...
This person has an embedded MIDI file on every page, and a tiling background. There's a bunch of small banner/button graphics that represent spurious awards and club memberships, often with terrible 3D effects and drop shadow on text.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970413022021/http://www7.geoci...
What we have really is a collision between the gimmicks of new graphics technology (and sound, because "multimedia" was a buzzword), limited bandwidth (hence tiles and small images), naivety, poor taste, and a sort of sticker-sharing scrapbooking sense of community that might have evolved from email groups or actual newsletters sent to friends by mail.
Like MySpace would later for social network profiles and YouTube for videos, Geocities had broken through as the frictionless and free opportunity to host a personal site online, and its explosive growth outpaced any opportunity for "classically trained" designers or programmers to assert their own opinions about color, layout, structure, robustness, etc
Elsewhere in modern-ish history, you can identify comparable explosions in pamphleting, photography, manufactured food products, casette tape, synthesizers, home video, etc where people with no preconceptions are just doing wild stuff to see what's possible.
And frankly, a lot of stuff on npm, etc looks like that right now.
If you were advanced, you'd use one of the external editors from the time (Homesite, Hot Metal, Hotdog, or even Microsoft Front Page) and FTP your files in.
Most of these originated from kids, teenagers, or even young adults, who want to do something fun. And what is “fun” is basically the opposite of what we (I’m including myself here because I was one of those) see everyday from our parents and schools: Monochrome documents with business-y fonts and layout. Geocities and the like were our chance to do something of our own that is very much away from that.
For starters, HTML, CSS and JavaScript couldn’t do everything it can today.
Next depending on the year, many if not most people didn’t have broadband or fast internet. Speed was even more important than today and keeping things relatively simple made sense. Similar to Craigslist too.
It was early internet, with not as many people on the internet.
Having something clear and to make your own easily (a website) was making a really hard thing very accessible to the most amount of people. In that way it was pretty successful in getting so many people going. There weren’t a lot of places to build your own website, let alone online.
Major user growth started around or shortly after Facebook launched.
Does anyone have any idea if any backups might have somehow survived?
Any names of anyone associated with running the Geocities systems or Geocities development? Anyone know who used to do the backups?
Geocities was such an important part of the early Internet.
Some archives have recovered bits and pieces of Geocities but it would be awesome to recover the entire thing.
CSS was created in 1999 but only the cutting edge version of browsers could support only link colors in 2000.
The editor was nothing but a text box, no WYSIWYG.
It was non-designers and people that were learning HTML putting something together.
There was no @font-face, so you could only reference fonts people might have on their computer.
On dialup you didn’t want to load too many images. So 1 background image that tiled 50 times would load fast.
You had to use nested tables to have any structure and again put that all in a text box with no live preview or WYSIWYG. And using tables you needed to understand to use transparent gifs to prevent it from not looking right.
Many people didn’t have image editors except MS Paint, so the graphics you got had to be grabbed from somewhere else.
PNG didn’t exist, I don’t think MS-Paint supported gif on windows 95 or 98, it might of not even supported jpg. It primarily supported bmp.
But with David Carson style of design (grunge design) or lack of traditional design in the mainstream for most of the 90s it kind of worked ok.
The tools were primitive, and skills were low.