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

  • CatZoomies@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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!

    • ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
    3·
    1 year ago

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

  • Turun@feddit.de
    3·
    1 year ago

    It’s readable on mobile. You need to unfix that immediately. The font must not appear bigger than 5px. Responsive layout is forbidden.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      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)

  • Simon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      frame

      Man, how did I forget those abominations?

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

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • CatZoomies@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.
    • neidu2@feddit.nl
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.