I’ve always been a somewhat nostalgic kind of guy, and as such I have fond memories of the way the internet used to be. These memories are often misplaced – the web is no doubt slicker and easier to use today than it ever has been – but nevertheless I like it because it feels familiar.
There’s also a lot to learn from old websites, and it’s fascinating to see how web design has progressed over the last ten years. Looking back at old Geocities sites then can be a great blast from the past and a great learning curve – particularly as they had such recognizable and now-infamous design sensibilities.
Read on to find out how you might go about designing a Geocities site. Read on, smile, but never actually do it…
Linear Layout
Geocities existed in the days before CSS, which meant that the majority of websites had to make use of a complete lack of formatting options. How did they get around this? By simply organizing the site all on one giant page like a massive list…
Inane Text and Graphics
What I truly loved about the ‘Geocities age’, was the complete lack of logic or sense to… well anything. What you would normally get is a page of random graphics (think Pikachu followed by an animated computer), followed by a paragraph of random information ‘Things I like’ or ’12 Funny Jokes’.
Pointless Effects
Often these sections of text would also be highlighted yellow or black. Why? Because that was one of the few effects available to website owners and they were sure as hell going to use it. Another very popular ‘effect’ was the marquee which forced the visitor to have to chase text across the screen if they intended to read it. Likewise, these sites would also invariably involve a lot of flashing – which was enough to trigger an epileptic fit in most people.
Music
If you could describe the Geocities web design sensibility as one thing, it would probably be ‘over-excited’. It seems that people just got the idea that ‘more was better’ and decided to throw everything they possibly could at their websites. This included a lot of graphics, but it also included a lot of music – most Geocities website had some kind of elevator or pan pipes music that would once again have nothing to do with the rest of the site. It was kind of enjoyable though on some level…
Frames
As Geocities sites began to get more advanced, we began to see the introduction of frames. Frames were essentially the only option we had back then for formatting, and were essentially little windows that showed other websites in them – essentially using iFrames to create a banner and a static navigation page.
This gave the desired effect most of the time (though site owners tended to leave the borders visible), but it meant that Google got confused on which page to show. Instead of showing the empty index page, it would often show the contents with no navigation, or even just the navigation.
Site owners then were forced to change their tune, and what we saw as a result was the beginning of Google dictating web design. Which continues to this day…
