What are some 90s website tropes?
Working on a website for my sister. I got some grainy gifs and a visitor counter. What else?
Syndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.mlView original on lemmy.ml
85 replies
"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:
YESS frames
I do miss the simplicity of frames, but I totally get why + 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.
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.
Lot of people on neocities.org use them!
https://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.
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.
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.
https://triviahappy.com/articles/welcome-to-the-net-every-webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net
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.
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.
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
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.
👉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
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?
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Geocities is required!
It doesn't exist anymore you'll have to settle for neocities.org!
@[email protected]
No, you need a time machine 😜
Marquee
Don't forget to add a Blink to that marquee!
That tag hasn't been operable in a zillion years
.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.
A CGI web-counter.
Good luck though, I found one page talking about them, it had 11 dead links to web counter pages.
WAIT! I have something for this!
A collection of Geocities sites. Pick a category and enjoy!
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.
"You are visitor #36,738"
Congratulations! You won!
animated gifs.
soooo many animated gifs
Hit random on neocities and came up with this:
https://empeethree.neocities.org/
I'd say that's pretty early 2000s
Scrolling text
Oh God no, I had forgotten all about that. That's just evil.
Do it, OP!
Autoplay a song and make the player controls tough to find
You need a banner ad where you have to punch the monkey to win a prize, and it changes the mouse pointer icon.
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.
Webrings.
Page colors that looked like Skittles vomit.
At least one broken image somewhere
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.
1337 h4x0r 5p34k
Gotta have a really tacky tiled background JPG.
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
The pride of our nation, Internet Mahir: I kiss you!
https://web.archive.org/web/20020726141104/http://www.istanbul.tc/mahir/mahir/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahir_%C3%87a%C4%9Fr%C4%B1
Dude was probably the first internet meme.
His page Seems like Fb of nowadays 🤣
Animated dividers. Like the blood dripping bar or the pulsing neon one. Or both if you were me.
Sitemap
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
Remember shoutboxes?
Gradients
My partner has some ideas… https://brosgetstoked.neocities.org/
I love it.
Tell him my favorite is the "visitor number one" part.
I made one as well.
https://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!
guest book
Also a guest counter.
This guy's site: https://dannarchy.com/
Nice. Also: https://fulcrumserver.org/
Being linked to a URL with ~
Dankpods the Youtuber made one. Take a look: https://www.dingusland.fun/
Jeff K
https://www.somethingawful.com/hosted/jeffk/