“Under Construction”

“Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher”

“An error has occurred in the script on this page.”

Site map

Web Ring link

A sitemap is still good accessibility practice for e.g. screenreader navigation.

They were everywhere:

ALT22857

An image gallery for no apparent reason with photos of your pets and family with no apparent image size or dimension consistency. Different fonts on everything often in different colours. Random string of emojis that are not of the standard type (there wasn’t a standard yet). A background of a single colour or simple repeating pattern.

Ha. And everyone has red eyes.

guest book

With a unsecured mysql database in the backend…

ahhh, that dastardly Bobby Tables!

My provider has a shared CGI script that added the post at a special tag in your HTML file.

…and because of poor permission handling everyone just had write permissions to these files for anyone to edit.

midi version of some popular (or relevant to whatever fandom the site is about) 90s song autoplaying and looping in the background

Important that it resets when you click a link.

Repeating background texture that makes the text a bit hard to read. Begging visitors to sign the guestbook. ‘Under construction’ gif for pages that aren’t done yet. Autoplay midi (probably not possible nowadays).

Tiled backgrounds but not repeating pattern

frames

old html tags like marquee that might not work anymore

under construction

webring links

hardcode it to 800x600

that setting i forget the name of where the background image is static but everything else scrolls

I thought it was called watermark or something, but supposedly it’s an IE-only setting called fixed:

<body background=“bg.jpg” bgproperties=“fixed”>

You can implement it with modern css.

Dankpods the Youtuber made one. Take a look: www.dingusland.fun

A page with links to your favorite web sites, usually some really popular sites everyone knows.

A FAQ page. Remember to have a snarky fourth wall breaking conversation with your own questions and answers. Don’t actually provide any useful information.

An obnoxious MIDI file playing in the background.

Don’t be afraid to add a lot of GIF images. Some sort of skull or that dancing baby are crucial.

If you really hate your users, implement the whole page in Shockwave.

Guest log.

Web rings.

“Secret” links like clicking on an unassuming graphic takes you to a secret page.

Contact info that includes a fax machine phone #

“Secret Links”, Like that one scene in that Sandra Bullock hacker movie, The Net.

triviahappy.com/…/welcome-to-the-net-every-webpag…

For me it’s webrings. And, they’re back. I’m in a hurry so fame l can’t research for you, but, they exist.

From what I’d read about it, search engines have become kinda shit, focusing on SEO and paid sponsored results than actually showing what someone searched for, so some small websites form webrings to help people find similar websites/interests while they’re on their site. I think it’s pretty cute/fun.

baccyflap.com/rsp/

I love that who gets added to the webring is exclusively in competence of the existing members, and it’s just a question of convincing any one of the existing members to link to your site. It’s a mathematical property of their structure and it must lead to some interesting power dynamics.

Lot of people on neocities.org use them!

Dancing baby gif somewhere on the page is a must.

A random button that directs you to “You Are An Idiot” hosted on albinoblacksheep.com
Bonus points if you can get it to look like it’s still running on Shockwave flash

Maybe a geocities domain?

@Dettweiler42@lemmy.dbzer0.com @wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
Geocities is required!

It doesn’t exist anymore you’ll have to settle for neocities.org!

Scrolling text

Oh God no, I had forgotten all about that. That’s just evil.

Do it, OP!

<marquee>Marquee</marquee>

Don’t forget to add a <blink>Blink</blink> to that marquee!

That tag hasn’t been operable in a zillion years

This guy’s site: dannarchy.com

Nice. Also: fulcrumserver.org

 ---------------------------------------
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
| Frame 1 |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|---------|                             |
|         |          Frame 3            |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
| Frame 2 |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
 ---------------------------------------

YESS frames

I do miss the simplicity of frames, but I totally get why <div> + CSS replaced it.

Not knowing much about web design, is it just for more flexibility?

I can’t say for sure what the real reason was, but it was rather limiting. There’s a reason why any website that wanted to look even a little bit different used flash, it was just easier to work with back then.

Hmm, okay.

Too much freedom to look however you want has been a bad thing, that can be said for sure. You let a random servers render whatever they want to the user, and you get the cancerous slop-clickbait sites that are everywhere now.

You need a banner ad where you have to punch the monkey to win a prize, and it changes the mouse pointer icon.

custom cursors

text in a colour other than black or white that doesn’t stand out against the background well

refer to yourself as a ‘webmaster’

We have a webmaster where I work!

To be fair, there is quite some static web presence to maintain.

mystery-meat imagemap navigation

Oh man, it’s been so long since I’ve seen an imagemap. Or at least one that’s obviously an imagemap.

I’m kind of nostalgic for it now.

At least one broken image somewhere

Sitemap

My partner has some ideas… https://brosgetstoked.neocities.org/

Tell him my favorite is the “visitor number one” part.

I made one as well.

sims2anin.neocities.org

Cool! (Btw I can only get to your website if I remove the www from the link)

Good to know, thank you!

I love it.

Hit random on neocities and came up with this:

empeethree.neocities.org

I’d say that’s pretty early 2000s

The BLINK tag

Also marquee tag

“Their tags shall blink until the end of days.” - Book of Mozilla, 12:10

@perviouslyiner @asklemmy You try to tell kids today that we had a <blink> tag and they don’t believe you

• use tables for layout, don’t hide the borders and don’t merge them
• also use iframes for root layout
• use the first 16 named css colors only
• only use default serif font in default size, don’t consider wide screens so body copy flows across the whole screen

Page colors that looked like Skittles vomit.

animated gifs.

soooo many animated gifs

Being linked to a URL with ~

👉CLICK HERE to E-MAIL👈

Email is the link, not the words click here and certainly not the entire thing.

You evil evil bastard.

I tried so many times to make sense of this reply LOL

A CGI web-counter.

Good luck though, I found one page talking about them, it had 11 dead links to web counter pages.

Several ambitious and promising-sounding sections that will always just say ‘under construction’

www.timecube.net

.wav background music starts playing and maybe you can turn it off. But maybe not.

Oh no way, had to be shitty midi covers of Beatles songs.

Random fact: modern browsers don’t seem to allow you to autoplay songs when you first visit a page, but it’s possible to autoplay music when you navigate to another page on the same domain.

Two paragraphs talking about how great you feel about finally getting on the World Wide Web. Include as many typos as possible.

A dozen links to other websites (make sure at most only 2 of them actually work).

Excessive use of the BLINK tag in titles.

Copy and paste some random Ascii art but make sure not to use the right font so nothing aligns properly.

Real Audio music files.

Remember shoutboxes?

Gradients

“You are visitor #36,738”

Congratulations! You won!

One page, one really long page, then the links to other pages have to go to under construction, or have 5 lines at most with no menu

WAIT! I have something for this!

A collection of Geocities sites. Pick a category and enjoy!

The pride of our nation, Internet Mahir: I kiss you!

web.archive.org/web/20020726141104/…/mahir/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahir_Çağrı

Dude was probably the first internet meme.

His page Seems like Fb of nowadays 🤣

Autoplay a song and make the player controls tough to find

Gotta have a really tacky tiled background JPG.

Animated dividers. Like the blood dripping bar or the pulsing neon one. Or both if you were me.

Webrings.

1337 h4x0r 5p34k

guest book

Also a guest counter.

Jeff K

www.somethingawful.com/hosted/jeffk/