What should I add to my '90s website?

AJ Sadauskas@aus.social to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 242 points –

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?

UPDATE: Thanks for all the feedback! I've added more annoying GIFs, a guestbook, a links page, and a cyber cat hangout.

UPDATE 2: And added even more gifs, an amazing Amiga demo, and a ton of links.

@asklemmy #tech #webdev #neocities #technology

154

Why are there no sparkles that follow my mousepointer?

Remember that JS file that rendered a text besides your mouse pointer and when you moved your mouse, the text would follow it letter by letter?

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.

Guestbook, hit counter, a midi file playing in the background, and a dead hyperlink to another page of the same website.

Edit: omg I can't believe I forgot about marquees. Do that too.

Are you in a webring with other 90's websites?

I second this, they need a webring, it's what I went looking for.

Remember ``````? And maybe add some dancing hamsters?

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)

I was fully prepared for the experience from my teens. My first thought was "that loaded way too fast."

Sorry but were you alive in the 90s? That tile background is way too big. Take it down to 128 x 128 anything bigger than that takes too long on my 56k. Also I don't see one frame or table border.

frame

Man, how did I forget those abominations?

Saved so much time and bandwidth reloading several kilobytes of headers and menus.

Signed the guestbook :)

I think it could do with a very literal under construction image, with some sort of machinery- every website seemed under construction at the time!

Something like this?!

there is a website for a pizza place in seattle whose website does this, maybe you can get some inspiration. dinos

Iframes with more iframes inside.

Regular frames, not iframes. We didn't have iframes back then!

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

Blinkies - those small gifs that blinked to give the impression of glitter.

iframes - precursor to divs, but definitely added that "only works in IE" feel.

More contrast between font color and background image - it's too easy to read.

12pt Times New Roman font - gotta squint to read and default font for everything

Flashy gif banner at your header and footer - bonus points if they're the same image

All urls default to underlined blue and purple.

Mouse cursor with trails. The more sparkles, the better.

Clip art. Clip art everywhere.

Nice start, this is very nostalgic! If you ever had an old Geocities, Tripod, or even MySpace back in the day, check out the Way Back Machine and look for that old URL for some inspiration.

I recommend the following suggestions to build upon this better:

  • Good if you can make this an HTTP site rather than HTTPS, although I'm not sure if that's possible on Neocities.
  • Fix the font choice - back then in CSS you would list a series of fonts that would render - Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana, Times New Roman. It's too legible, so switch it to a color pink that is a bit harder to discern from the background. You need black rectangle backgrounds for some of the text.
  • The framerate on the GIFs is too high. More pixels and less frames - preferably no more than 15 FPS if possible. I used Macromedia Fireworks back in the day and some other Macromedia animation program, good if you could have terrible color profiles on some of the GIFs).
  • Affiliates sidebar linking some sites. It may be good to link to other retro 90s-inspired sites. They're out there, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
  • Include some fake banner ads and sidebar ads - not pop up ads as those were the bane of existence. Maybe old banner ads for Rack Nine web hosting, or something similar (and of course they shouldn't link anywhere).
  • "Jump to Top" anchor hyperlinks.
  • You need a low quality midi that plays in the background automatically - no user choice.
  • Add a Favicon.
  • Plenty of links on the page that don't go anywhere. And more under construction signs.
  • Adjust the resolution of the background tile - it's too big and too high quality. Get it to something like 128x128 or 250x250.
  • Add a Shoutbox. Remember those? Although I'm not sure how to keep it secure.
  • A link to "Bookmark this site".
  • You need a fan art page that only has 4 fan arts, says "under construction", and possibly steal other people's fan art and credits them so it looks like there is actually content on the page while hiding the fact that you have no time to work on this web site but you're hoping a million visitors will one day come here.
  • I already see marquees which is great. Good if you can another marquee that has text moving in a wave/ripple pattern as it slowly (and keyword: very, very slowly) moves across the screen. I don't remember if you could have alternating color text as part of it, my old HTML, PHP, and CSS knowledge escapes me from 20 years ago.
  • A link to your PHPBB or Invision Power forum that, when clicked, only takes you to a blank white screen with the typical MySQL error. The hyperlink should have a badly inserted text next to it that says "This is currently down, we will fix it with a new Forum software after Finals Week!", the more ASCII art the better. I recommend something like the below.
General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Table './that90ssite/phpbb_sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

I forgot to add - I believe Kirby was popular as ASCII art in the 90s.

Get this Kirby dance on that web site somewhere ASAP:

<(^_^<)
<(^_^)>
(>^_^)>

Use of marquees is a violation of the Geneva convention. You monster.

1 more...

Uppercase all of your html elements in the markup. Image mapped links. A background that doesn't quite tile properly. Max width 800px

And like a gif of a skull opening his mouth that shows a flame "E-mail" materialize from it or something.

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.

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.

While the blink html element is no longer supported you could probably sprinkle some JS to toggle the visibility state on the marquee element to really bring back the same feel. It's just not the 90s without blink. Also, there needs to be a page that is just a bunch of links aligned using low res images and tables.

some text

@neidu2 Done :)

I don't exactly remember, but it's possible to have the embed start automatically and not show the player. I would suspect that is at least partially correct or similar.

Modern browsers have dropped support for the marquee tag, so you’ll have to reimplement it in JavaScript.

Adding some inspiration from well-developed 90s sites via the Wayback Machine.

These will take a while to load and will appear broken. The Wayback Machine is a free service hosted on the Internet Archive and bandwidth isn’t cheap!

This list of sites is, of course, from the frame of view of a kid growing up in the United States in the 1990s. I visited a lot of other sites but I can't remember them - I only remember the ones I visited in the early 2000s that didn't exist in the 90s.

Design is too mobile responsive

The great irony is: websites in the 90's would have been made to cater to resolutions of 640x480. Fancy monitor resolutions went up to 1024x768.

So, viewing it on a mobile screen should be nicer than what a full computer in the 90's could offer.

’90s websites would have had terrible touch target sizes

There is not enough contrast or too much contrast between your text and the background.

What I’m trying to say is that is too easy on the eyes to read the text. 😂

Yes, the background pattern and colours should be chosen to actively interfere with reading any text on the page. For example, it's great if there's large patches of black in the background and the text is also black.

Flashing is also key. A lot of text should be flashing and there should be unreadable ticker tape text at random places.

My wife just added that it should have some background music.

Needs an animated gif that doesn't properly render transparency, so the background is just a solid color.

It should work at 640x480 and no other resolution.

The midi file doesn't play automatically, but I see that's a thing your working on.

Also need gifs of Bart Simpson saying "Don't have a cow man"

Custom curors that animate at rest and during loading so you're not sure which part of the curors clicks, and also not sure sure if something is being loaded or not. Bonus points if the cursor changes to yet another ambiguous animated one as you hover over a tiny button which would pause the midi track.

Guestbook didn't work, after recaptcha it just said POST failed. Oh and you need a visitor counter!

Line by line loading images, maybe an error message saying the connection dropped with the modem sound playing to restart the page.

@ajsadauskas @linux Image maps? ? A digital view counter, or one of those gifs of a spinning odometer.
A link that goes to a clip art digger saying 'under construction' in 90s office clip art.

Absolutely, imagemap. Extra kudos if you use a pre-v1.0 GIMP, pen and paper.

That site would have been considered remarkably beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. As such it's not quite realistic.

Much too legible. I recommend less contrast for the text.

I don't see you playing with alignment? I would like more centered text personally. And long lines of text without breaks.

Why not throw in some "lorem ipsum" placeholders.

Are you using a WYSIWYG editor?

Where are your dancing hampsters?

Also is this before or after it became trendy to copy/paste all sorts of scripts into the html? Remember scrolling text on the status bar, how about those ascii things that follow your mouse around?

I'd keep an eye on your page's size, remember we would be loading this on 56k dialup modems... if we were lucky!

Also remember the nearest comparison to building a website, was a book, magazine, or newspaper. So just plop those text and images down as if it was a book, only ever intended to be viewed at one fixed resolution (say, 800x600). No smartphones yet. No apps to inspire us. No web 2.0. No emphasis on minimalism or dynamic content.

Unexpected and unpleasant things should happen with different browsers, window sizes, etc.

Background audio player that automatically plays some crusty grunge midis

256 colors. Especially for that background. Or maybe even less and use dithering.

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.

Macromedia player. Used to play a lot of cartoon network games online back in the day with net zero and win 98 back in 1999

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.

Infinite popups, simulated of course now that most web browsers block popups.

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy You need to change the mouse cursor to anything but an arrow. Bonus points if it leaves a trail. Like a peace sign cursor that leaves a rainbow trail, or a clock face where the numbers fall off when it moves.

use html tables with large borders ... or that is how I feel the old times look

My bank still uses HTML tables in some parts of their website. Im sure its fine but it makes me cringe a bit whenever I see it.

I love it! Takes me right back. I was going to suggest adding a visitor counter but you already had it.

Oh man -- you need a blink tag on some of that text. Support for the tag has been removed from all modern browsers.

So you'll need to add it in with javascript that updates CSS or something.

One of those Java applets at the bottom that looks like water reflecting the site background perhaps?

@ajsadauskas@aus.social @asklemmy@lemmy.ml I think I actually have a few of my 90s-era sites archived. One of them should have an auto play midi for the background music. I'll see if I can dig it up!

@ajsadauskas@aus.social @asklemmy@lemmy.ml I actually started down this path a little while back and have since gotten sidetracked.

https://weblike99.com/

I think that maybe not knowing how to make the embedded midi auto-play is more authentic!

But I used to use Autostart=true in the Embed tag.

@bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world I was trying this with the HTML5 audio tag but not having any luck. It may be client browser specific.

Ah, sorry, I was only looking at what I did in the 90s!

Looking at the page, there's a console error that says something about "invoke Tone.start()" so I wonder if it needs some javascript to do that, maybe

``

I think that it's including this player code?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/midi-player-js

But the docs there describe creating a new MidiPlayer object and calling play() instead of start(), so I'm probably not helping.

I don't work with javascript, so this is all pure guesswork.

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy (Trying to remember my own GeoCities site from back then), Many had a “best viewed on Netscape” icon

I think mine had mostly my own song lyrics, with a different background for each page, with a menu page and forward/back links on each lyrics page.

Were frames 90s? Friend of mine used frames to make his site look like a console from Star Trek TNG

It has a cat gif I don't think it needs anything else I'm sorry

You've got the under construction gif. Done.

You need to offer something banal for download with a spinning stiffy disk gif.

Add a guest book a page vist counter and a web ring

I recommend a "gallery" of photos of whatever topic you want, but probably something obscure like your favorite McDonalds playgrounds or of you holding up fish you've caught. The resolution on the pictures can't more than 640x480 tho.

Nice project. I like the nostalgia. 👍

After some searching I learned that Tripod and Angelfire still exist today as web hosting providers. Your page could have a few more Under construction signs here and there.

The cat art style doesnt look 90ish to me

Check out maya.land. especially webmentions.

I don't know how to tag a user on lemmy. Is maya still around?

I'm also a big fan of confusing landing pages.

EDIT: an RSS feed for any website, old or new

@ajsadauskas @neil @asklemmy Looks amazing!

My only question is about whether drop shadows on text was prominent. I’m having trouble remembering how that effect would have been accomplished in the 90s, since I don’t think CSS got it until later. Would it have been something on the \ tag only supported in Internet Explorer?