Nostalgia

Here is a little article about my experience on the personal site space of the old web of the late 90's and early 2000's!

As more and more people are beginning to see the negative sides of social media, they're flocking to other methods of putting themselves online. There's been a resurgence of personal webpages made strictly for fun on the internet in the last few years. As someone who was very active in this space in the past, I'm thrilled to see a comeback of the types of websites I loved to see and build myself: personal sites, blogs, character shrines, fanlistings, cliques, and webrings.

Since a lot of people making these sites are younger and were just children or not even born yet when I was originally doing this, I thought it would be fun to talk about my experiences back then!

Yes, I'm in my 40's now and making a website like this, full of cute pixels, fandoms, and drawing fanart. It may be cringe, but I am free. Okay? I must have the whimsy. I must do a frolic. HISS.

I first had internet access in 1996 as a 10th grader in high school. Dating myself even more now. By then, I firmly had one foot firmly planted in the analog days of record players, 8-tracks, roll down windows, and smoking in every public space. The other was doing a lil wiggle into the digital.

My first little website was probably on Geocities or something similar, where I posted artwork I made in MS Paint, probably full-on bitmaps instead of jpegs (because jpeg saved horribly from MS Paint back in the late 90's, and images loaded slowly anyway). I made a small personal “about me” type of website. I called it Bobbi's World. Yes, like the cartoon, only Bobbi with an “I” not a “Y”.

Later in high school, I made another version of Bobbi's World and put it on gURLpages. Gurl.com was a teen girl e-zine that had games, articles and things and it was advertised in Delia*s catalogs for peak Y2K vibes. They had a trendy webhost and it was where I really started getting into making sites. I made all kinds of pages with bright rainbow graphics, comic sans, colorful buttons made in MS Paint, and pages full of my early artwork on a pre-installed photo editor program on my Gateway PC (which had a 6GB harddrive or something ridiculously small by today's standards).

I made other sites like some early character shrines on Geocities. I also played around with pages and things on Neopets. I learned HTML through Lissa Explains, like many venturing into the world wide web who were young or liked blinding colors and comic sans.

Early Personal Site Content

There were many ways to categorize your websites. The most popular among people in their teens and early 20's making these sites was Me, You, WWW. Me meaning the personal stuff, You was content for the visitor to keep them around longer. WWW was site-related stuff and links elsewhere. More or less, this type of structuring stayed, and I even see people using something similar today! It warms my little sTiCkY cApS HeArT!

The goal was to have lots of stuff about yourself, but lots of the visitor to do.

Looking through my last version of Bobbi's World, (circa 2000, from my hard drive) I had a plethora of content. The personal section of my site isn't much unlike what it is here, except I decided it was a good idea to post my daily schedule. Yikes.gif I kept a little hand-coded journal before moving elsewhere (probably Xanga or Livejournal). I had photos from high school that I scanned and edited in paint shop pro.

I was trying to do things other sites were doing, because my goal was to make my site as full of content as possible so I could get hosted. Getting hosted was a sign that you were in the big personal site big leagues now. I'll write more about that later.

I gave out site ratings, because I was surely qualified to do that on Geocities with my little popup window and dropdown menu. I had a page to sponsor people, and I have no recollection of what that was or the relevance? Why would that mean anything? I'm not sure, but I probably saw others with better designed sites doing this, and I wanted to do it too. I clearly hadn't quite grown out of the “I want to fit in badly” phase by my senior year of high school.

I gave out cute little awards and graphics to other sites who applied for them. I was just getting into anime at the time (my crush was into anime, and I cannot communicate unless shared interests). So yeah anime graphics featuring Sailor Moon and Pokemon were a thing I gave people.

There were site competitions. One place called The Rumbles was one I was heavily involved in, both early on and later on. I much later on ended up leading one of the Rumbles teams with my friend Amy. We were both active in it early on, and it was fun trying to get votes to move up weekly. There were many sites like this, but this was one I was involved with.

Early personal site design

The thing is, while people wanting to recreate the old internet don't realize is that the marquees, piles of gifs gathered from every inch of the internet, and tons of 88x31 Windows 98 styled buttons were actually kind of frowned upon in this space. That is, if you REALLY care about what people did.

Of course, these sites existed. But if you were in the scene making a site like this *gestures*, you wanted to make it pleasantly SHINY.

You wanted to avoid ads, popups, music on autoplay, marquees (unless very carefully added). Avoiding too many animated gifs was important too! Javascript with very specific effects was okay, like graphical scrollbars. You just wanted to avoid a lot of flashy eyesore effects. It was important for your site design to be clean, attractive and pleasing to the eye. Content was second, but also very important too.

The goal was, especially if you were on a freehost like Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities, Nupages (you were cool if you were on nupages) was to get yourself hosted by someone who owned a domain.

Someone who owned a domain would allow you to have some space on their server to host your site. So you could get yourself hosted by some trendy domain name. It was even cooler if the host had a .nu domain. For some reason, we all collectively decided that .nu domains were cooler that baja blast. If you had one, you were super cool. I still like this domain extension, despite the bagjillions of better ones that exist lol.

Criteria to get yourself hosted usually involved having a very well-designed website with plenty of content. People were picky about who they would accept, and you had to apply.

I was determined to get hosted by a cool domain. The only thing I could get hosted on a cool domain was a clique.

Domains

I eventually got Bobbi's World hosted… at a random Goth website. At the time, I did not appreciate the goth scene or fashion. It was kind of disappointing, but I stuck it out there for awhile until I bought my first ever domain, Sweet-Essence.net.

I ended up being the person that hosted others. I want to say at one point, I probably had about 8-10 hostees and a little shared blog where we'd make a little community together. It was cozy and fun.

I'm a weirdo and still have printouts of when I bought my first domain and hosting. Funny to think that it's so much cheaper now than it was when I started.

Getting a domain meant that you were super-cool, and being a 19 year old neurodivergent whose brain wouldn't fully mature until closer to 30, I was heavily interested in looking cool online. My favorite domains that I owned were Overload.nu, and then later Valkyrie.nu.

Though from 2006-2009, I put a lot of effort into making December-Rain.org into a space for Character Shrines and personal stuff. I had a great time making so many cool layouts back then.

Rose-colored glasses

As much nostalgia as I have for little sites like these back in those times, I can't help but remember some of the less than pleasant experiences online.

It was so easy for people to anonymously harass or comment on people's guestbooks, blog comments, tagboards (or chatboxes). This community was dominated by a lot of younger people who were in a different mindset.

One of the larger problems I remember encountering was the stealing of website layouts. It wasn't just limited to stealing some css and html. People would steal and direct link entire websites. Then claim that they would never do such a thing once found out. After sending people to harass the person stolen from, the victim had no choice but to change their layout or painfully change all their original graphics so the perpetrator would see lovely messages on their website. This happened to myself and friends of mine a number times.

There was a level of elitism that came with getting hosted, and with some specifically elite cliques and webrings too. While on one hand, it gave people something to strive for, it's something I feel is best left in the past.

Hopes for the future

I would like to see more of a return to the way things were. I don't think it will ever be as mainstream as it used to be. Most people interact on small devices like tablets and phones which aren't the best for making websites. Not everyone owns a PC at this point, and a lot of people interact with apps rather than strictly through their browsers.

I really hope for a future where we are collaborating and creating together online, rather than simply consuming whatever is regurgitated at us for ad revenue. It was part of what made the early days of the web great. I hope that spirit stays alive and burns ever brighter as we build a better internet together.