What should I add to my '90s website?
So I’m currently toying around with NeoCities, and decided to trial it by building your classic mid '90s Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire pastiche website.
Some of the most important elements are already in place.
Tile background? Large font? Heading in bright pink with a shadow? Unusual colour choices? Random cat gifs? Under construction gif? Check! Check! Check!
In the true spirit of the '90s DIY web, some more pages (including the links page) are coming soon.
(I’m thinking of adding a page dedicated to either Britney or a nu-metal band.)
You can see the page so far here: https://that90ssite.neocities.org/
There are a few things that I want to add to make it complete, and I’m looking for suggestions.
The first, is to embed a midi file that plays automatically. Any suggestions on the best way of doing this?
Second, it’s just not going to be complete without a guestbook.
Third, any webring suggestions?
Fourth, what’s the best way of adding a java chat room in 2024?
Finally, anything else that really needs to be a part of a great '90s website?
Remove adaptive formatting, fixed width everything. Why should you care about my browser and screen size? That was part of why the pages looked more clunky in later years: the increase in screen resolution were not taken into account, so that pages sat tinily in the top left of the screen. Generally, lack of useful formatting was widespread. Just writing the text into naked HTML, having a few links (in default blue/purple) and you’re good to go. I’m not sure if bullet points were even used.
Once you add some content, put it into a default HTML table without added styling. I don’t even know if browsers still display these shitty gray bars, but you saw them everywhere.
And if you want to look professional, of course use frames! Preferably with fixed sites, too much text in them and scrollbars everywhere…
:funnytagthatonlytranslatedtoanemojionaspecificbulletinboard:
I remember feeling like a webdesign master when I figured out frames. I was always more of a backend guy (perl + CGI = ❤️), but frames enabled me to produce pretty decent looking websites.
<frame>😠include😒include_once🥳<?php 😫
Needs 300% more skull trumpet.
My favorite version of the skull trumpet: Makes a man go doot doot
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Infinite popups, simulated of course now that most web browsers block popups.
For the authentic experience, you need two versions of the site: An Internet Explorer version, and a Netscape version. The two browsers didn’t support the same features back then, so a lot of sites would have two different versions.
Also run it on your own server and limit the transfer speed (can set a rate limit in the Nginx config) so it loads slowly :D
Line by line loading images, maybe an error message saying the connection dropped with the modem sound playing to restart the page.
Your text is too readable, I think it needs to be aliased a lot more. It also wasn’t uncommon to see a black box around text. Your text looks good on the background, it shouldn’t. There should be something between the text and background.
It’s readable on mobile. You need to unfix that immediately. The font must not appear bigger than 5px. Responsive layout is forbidden.
Also, no popups, That’s both retro and not retro enough. (Or were those introduced for the first round in the early 2000’s? I don’t know, I’m too young)
That cat is way too high res
You need some “important” data that’s in an unstyled bulky table. You also need some horizontal rules on the page to split up content.
Adobe flash.
Nah that was a 2000s thing. It existed, under different names and owned by different companies in the 90s up until 2005 when it was bought by Adobe but you wouldn’t likely have seen flash elements on webpages. I think it was more of a vector drawing tool around that time.
Internet Explorer had an API called ActiveX, which let you run native code in the browser. Flash was an ActiveX object, but there were others available too. Adobe Shockwave was already available for Internet Explorer 3 in 1996 (https://news.microsoft.com/1996/06/03/microsoft-and-macromedia-deliver-shockwave-and-activex-to-millions-of-web-customers-and-developers/), and in the 90s you’d usually see either Shockwave or Java.
A precursor to Flash (FutureSplash) was already available in the 90s too, but it wasn’t quite as popular yet.
ah nuts. I could only remember seeing it post 2000s and then I thought, before saying it wasn’t really a thing in the 90s I should double check that that’s actually true so I did a very quick bit of research which seemed to indicate it wasn’t really around or used in the manner it’s most well known for on websites and assumed that cursory research would be enough. Goes to show you need more than lip service to fact checking.
Absolutely needs a hit counter.
Not one person suggested a marquee. Wow.
Granted, the HTML tag is deprecated in the spec, but you can easily set up a marquee using CSS.
This is going on my bookmarks toolbar. Thank you!
You need a dancing baby.
I just signed the guestbook leaving that exact suggestion and then read your comment, lol.
Can we have a globe please that magically spins?
