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?
You might get some useful ideas on !oldweb@lemmy.ml (although it seems abandoned now)
Iframes with more iframes inside.
Ironically still common today, just subtle. Open up any Google Drive picker and look at the page DOM
Regular frames, not iframes. We didn’t have iframes back then!
And a “Break out of frames” link
“Break out of frames” link
That is a memory I have suppressed.
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)
That cat is way too high res
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.
Infinite popups, simulated of course now that most web browsers block popups.
Line by line loading images, maybe an error message saying the connection dropped with the modem sound playing to restart the page.
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.
Absolutely needs a hit counter.
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.
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.
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
You need a dancing baby.
I just signed the guestbook leaving that exact suggestion and then read your comment, lol.
This is going on my bookmarks toolbar. Thank you!
