Your Home On The Web

NOTICE...

This is a school assignment for my AP Language class. Two things to address.
1: If you are Dr. Cole, this is for you.
2: If you're finding this randomly --- since this website is public --- hello. Nice seeing you here.
That is all. Feel free to continue reading.
Thank you for your time :)

The Beginning

Brandon Stanton was in the 7th grade when he decided to make his first ever website. Building a site off of raw HTML and colorful gifs forked from other sites, “Gaming Galaxy Online” was brought to life. He built his page out of passion and the means to share himself online: inspiration pulled from other pages with like-minded users. Similar to these other webpages, he hosted his webpage on Geocities.com: a free, popular web hosting service in the 1990s.

By no means was his website well-made. It was meant to be viewed as a passion project, after all — one that revolved around simply having fun. Hence, it was exciting for him to build a page of his own — to participate in what he felt like was the adult world — to connect, to thrive, and create. Although his page never picked up any traction, he and his friend decided to keep on pursuing the idea of making these small, hand-made web pages. One after another.

It didn’t matter to him that each page resulted in the same outcome: no traction, no “hits,” and no recognition. The making of these websites were most fulfilling, even if the effort was never seen by the public eye. Years went on with the same result, the same effort, and the same means.

He continued to make websites up until creating his most influential project twenty years later: “Humans of New York”. Capturing the lives of thousands of random people all over the world, this photoblog project aims to collect the stories of random folks in NYC. In each entry, Stanton publishes a personal narrative regarding an individual alongside their photograph. His unique way of feeding these elements into the broader aspect of storytelling has led him to become a well-known author and artist.

It was another night on August 10th, 2013, when Stanton was out in the late-night streets of New York gathering content. Looking for an individual to interview, he stumbled across a man sitting alone in the plaza off of 59th and 5th street. Curious-minded, he decided to pursue that opportunity.

After capturing the man’s photo, Stanton began his interview. Moments in, he prompted:
“What was the happiest moment of your life?”

“Probably when my company had its ↪ IPO,” (hover for desc)

he started.

“I founded a company called Geocities.com.”

This interviewee was David Bohnett.

Amazed, Stanton recalled his time spent using that platform — the friends he made, the community he created, and the opportunities it furthered him into achieving. He considered the idea that the prosperity of the old web was closely linked to his self-expression. To be said, Geocities was his starting point (Stanton).

Many others like Stanton can recall the home that was known as the old web. However, is that creativity — that hands-on-experience — lost in the midst of the new internet? Why does it matter — and most importantly,
how has the personalization of the web changed?

For you, navigate this page as if it was developed by the hands of a passionate kid. Notice its flaws — its unconventionality. Don’t let it throw you off:

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted.” — Cesar A. Cruz

It is passion that drives the soul to create, after all. Remember that.

Built From Scratch

In the early days of the internet — just around 1994 — American Philanthropist, David Bohnett, created a free web-hosting service known as Beverly Hills Internet (soon rebranded to Geocities). This hosting service came to be one of the greatest archives of internet history that gave those with “like-minded interests” a personalized place on the internet to publicly share their passion. (VoyageLA). Geocities was the gateway to the expansion of the internet — providing users a blank webpage to express themselves through the means of neighbourhoods, webrings, internet trophies, and raw HTML.

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Figure 1
The growing size of GeoCities, 1995–1997
(Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder)
Source: https://ucldigitalpress.co.uk/Book/Article/45/70/3456/

See here: the exponential growth of Geocities between the years of 1995 and 1997. Although the website didn’t initially take off, it soon began to exponentially grow in mid-1998 — skyrocketing at 18,000 new users per day (Motavalli). This is important to note because it provides significance in regards to what made Geocities unique; to be said, allowing many to freely express themselves on this platform.

The prosperity of this website was taken into consideration by Yahoo!, which bought out the company in 1999. When bought, it was currently the “third most visited site on the web,” placing it beside AOL and Yahoo! itself. Hence, its success was far from undocumented for.

Unfortunately, as a result, Yahoo! removed a lot of aspects that made Geocities unique. Many users became furious since these “communities” they built were gone in seconds without any means of archive. (fortunately, the Wayback Machine — a digital tool that archives old websites — has kept a lot of these lost pages). Consequently, Geocities is now recognized in two parts: a pre-Yahoo! era and post-Yahoo! era.

For the simplicity of structure, the upcoming segments will focus on Geocities pre-Yahoo! era — in which most information, statistical data, and historical archive takes place.

Pack Your Stuff, We’re Moving!

One reason to which Geocities was popularized is due to its ease of accessibility — it was an easy process to sift through webpages and be compelled to create your own. Although Geocities was not necessarily the only webhoster that allowed users to publish their own sites, Geocities outran most of these website hosts. Users were able to host a website for free by having an email address — filling out a form here and there — and collecting together images and gifs that suited their best interest to publish on their page. This ideal fell into the concept of a static webpage: where pages were usually hand-coded with HTML, CSS, and WYSIWYG (at the time of their popularity). These represent different coding languages that were used to create these websites. As a result, these pages were heavily focused on graphics, gifs, and loads upon loads of information for one’s “audience” to indulge and interact with.

However, due to its broad accessibility and a simple “blank page” to work with, many sites did not prioritize aesthetics. To be fair, many of them were prominent in eye-straining colors.

Figure 2
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“A screenshot of an archived Geocities page.”
Source: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/1249/
(olia)

This page, seen in figure 2, has many broken links — as did a lot of pages back in the Geocities era. The colors are difficult to navigate through and may cause harm to those with visual impairments or vision sensitivities in general.

Or, pages were — simply — outright strange. See the “navigation” below. Remember, all hand-crafted.

Figure 3
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“A navigation page that is centered around a repeating photo of Jesus Christ.”
Source: http://www.geocities.com/GwensP1026/
(despens)

Yes — people make “navigations” in honor of Jesus Christ. It was pretty typical to decorate your page in random niches and colors. This wacky means of design was not seen rarely: think more of every other page. Geocities was easy to log into and access, but not necessarily easy to work with. Consider the term netstalgia: the coined term used to describe the longing of these old websites (Maden). Geocities was not the holy grail of all websites, but it was free and popular:

…that’s why webmasters endured the pain of clumsy page builders, interventions from commercial scripts being injected into their pages, accidental file deletions, etc… not to mention all the mess and further restrictions Yahoo brought when it acquired the service. You could tell the history of GeoCities as history of its users being angry, frustrated and moving out as soon as there was a chance. Actually one should (olia).

One cannot refute the fact that navigating these pages, or furthermore, making one yourself…was difficult. For this reason, the memory of Geocities may be dismissed due to the difficulty it takes for one to pursue in their webpage via coding. The circumstances weren’t ideal, so why do many keep trying to revive this over-romanticized version of the internet?

Let's Talk Community!

To simply put: those who were dedicated to making a website were nothing but invested. If a user had a desire, or a certain aesthetic they wished to accomplish, they could achieve it through Geocities. People found profound joy in their Jesus Christ graphics; their glittery icons, their maximalized (or, in some rare cases, minimized) homepages. Additionally, each house had its own little circle to “live” in.

In the pre-yahoo era of Geocities, people founded their internet cliques in “communities”, otherwise known as “neighbourhoods.” In this way, this digitized home could feel a little more like real life.

Figure 4
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“Relative frequency of keywords ‘Community’ and ‘Neighbourhood’ in Lexis|Nexis database, 1995–2013”
(Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder)

This chart shows the relative frequency between these two words from 1995 (Geocities publishing) up until 2013. It is important to note the small spike seen in the year of 2009: the year in which Yahoo! determined the closing of the website (See figure 4). An essential aspect to the legacy of Geocities were these neighbourhoods: discrete, digital communities in which “lived” right next to each other — usually in means of sharing the same interests, goals, and general aspirations when online and offline. Each neighbourhood was represented by a distinct icon (or button) that would directly link back to their neighbourhood if spotted on somebody else's page. It was this way as a means of advertisement. Some examples include, but are not limited to:

Figure 5
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“Various buttons including the communities in Geocities”
(“GeoHoods”)
Psst: hover on each icon for a short description of what each neighbourhood entailed.

It’s true when I say that there was a community for everything. Every little niche, idea, or concept that could come to one’s mind was implemented through these communities. The initial idea of Geocities was that each user adopted a “block” to live in (numbers through 1000-9999 per neighbourhood) that sorted them into their ideal home. Additionally, you could recognize where your internet-neighbours lived via their URL. A URL to somebody’s page would look like so:

(neighbourhood/suburb/xxxx)
Figure 5.1

The “xxxx” represents a user’s block number. To further this idea, each neighbourhood had their moderators known as “Community Leaders” that would assist to help answer questions and build upon a user’s ideas. Community leaders would create a friendly atmosphere for newly-moving-in homesteaders: contributing to the positive, and unique concept, of Geocities (“GeoHoods”). Universally, these moderators would assist users in developing their pages' code and design. This was a key distinction that made Geocities stand out amongst other web hosting services. If you wanted help, you had it.

Figure 6
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“Word cloud of all community leader pages, 1996–1997 over six crawls.”
Generated by http://voyant-tools.org/
(Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder)

This word cloud assembles the most commonly used words used in Geocities bulletin boards. In these boards, a user could use certain keywords to bring attention to a moderator. For example, users could ‘Yell for SysOp’ and make an administrator's computer beep to assist the needed user (Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder). Hence, the collage above includes words such as “helping,” “answer,” “contact” … etc. to emphasize the reliability of these moderators along with the frequency users would ask for assistance.

Overall, what made Geocities unique was its special way of making a website feel more like a home opposed to a lifeless screen. So — although these websites had their flaws — they could embrace their pages’ quirks with webmakers alike. It was, ideally, a home.

Figure 7
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“A birds eye view of the neighbourhoods in Geocities.”
Source: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/3297 (despens)

This graph above shows the birdseye view of each neighbourhood in Geocities after being bought out by Yahoo!. On the right side of Figure 7, the post-neighbourhood era of "Vanity-Profiles" came into play — in which a user was no longer able to join a community. Instead of the original URLs that linked communities together (see figure 5.1), the newest update changed a user’s URL to look like so:

http://www.geocities.com/YahooID

Along with this update, old communities suffered from Symlink Cancer: a neighbourhood’s directory would no longer show up due to Yahoo!’s fault in their URL and file hosting system (despens). Additionally, this removed the purpose of communities all together (see figure 5).

Fortunately enough, older users with pre-chosen communities did not have to trade in their URL for a new one in accordance with this new feature. Nevertheless, this change was the beginning of Geocities downfall — and additionally — carved the way for the modernized internet.

A Solemn Goodbye

On the 23rd of April in 2009, Yahoo! suddenly announced the closure of Geocities through a brief article on their website’s “help” page ((c) 2009 AFP). It is speculated that this was due to the extreme cost-cutting it took to maintain Geocities, along with their profits lost after buying the originally well-maintained website. Although this decision was made to boost Yahoos! revenue, many users were profoundly distraught. In their web-journals, users would write their ode to the beloved site:

“It was more than just a collection of my writing, more than just another fanpage…and much more than just another lousy webpage from the 1990s. It was who I was 12 years ago. The places I linked…the places that linked to me, it’s all old history. But it’s my history…a piece of me.”
Keikimo’s Notes, April 24, 2009 (olia).

The ↪ webmaster,” (hover for desc) of this page resided in the neighbourhood of Area 51. In their solemn goodbye, they recite the memories and times spent on their little place in the interwebs. Keikimo, and many alike, spent reminiscing over the soon-to-be-gone website.

Circling Back: History Redone, A.K.A The Deconstruction of Read, Write, Own

Allow me to stress: Geocities was not the equivalent first form of web (A.K.A Web 1.0). Yes, it was a huge contributor to the future of web-making; however, it was not the entirety of what the “old web” used to be. Geocities was made for passionate minds, creators, and people alike. In current days — when people refer to the old web — it is widely remembered as a boring and dull place in which users would mindlessly stare at their screen… anticipating for it to load. Those who did not live during these times are set to believe that modern-web design is the most efficient way to produce and consume content: however, this is mere propaganda incorporated by brute 3.0 campaigners.

Additionally, it is a widely held belief that the earliest rendition of the web was read-only — meaning no interaction, no sharing, and no community. This opposes the essentials of what Geocities was crafted to be.

Figure 8
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“A diagram emphasizing the difference between web1, 2, and 3 respectively.”
Source: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/7358
(olia)

By far, this is the most efficient poster I've seen to recognize and enable the idea of “web3.” Essentially, it is saying that the history of the web is split into three eras: web1, 2, and 3, respectively. Geocities would be seen in the first bracket of “web1” due to its feature of static pages and hand-written HTML. However, web3 propaganda sets a user to believe that the old web had no form of interactivity (olia). This is highly inaccurate — and proven — to be the opposite.

Figure 9
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“A screenshot of an archived Geocities site with posted pictures.”
Source: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/7358
(olia)

On a website such as Geocities, users would create and “post” images long before the time of Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Although this is not the only screenshot in the major archive of the old web, I think it serves as a prime example of a website that was not “read only” during web1. In addition to this, there were many interactive parts about these old websites — guestbooks, comment sections, and even homemade video games. Life was seen — as well as documented — far before large corporations took over content creation. In fact, web1 had a lot of features that did make it interactable: hyperlinks, iframes, and gif buttons (Jain).

Of course, in all practicality, there is not a large chance of modern-day social media users reverting back to hand-coding websites. There is simplicity in the times we have now: the cellphones we have, the buttons we click, and the posts we like. People do not want to put in effort to code a site just to share their pictures — I get that. It sounds absurd considering the vast modernity of technology we have today. We can recognize the faults in the current rendition of the web today; however, there is a slim chance that many will read (or care) about the history of it.

Thankfully, alternatives do exist for those wishing to branch away from the now highly-digitalized world of technology and go back to the roots of solemn, static websites. Some select web-hosting services, such as Neocities, emulate the old services provided by Geocities (try not to confuse the two). Although this is not the only platform that holds this capability, it is the most popular — and most similarly — free of charge! (To make my point stand, you are reading this paper on Neocities). Unfortunately, Neocities cannot be a perfect replica of the retired web: abstaining from features such as communities and separate suburbs that made Geocities its distinct platform (olia). By no means is it perfection, but neither was Geocities.

In the end, the internet will always be what you make of it. If you wish, continue to scroll on modern-day social media: constantly interacting with content in your own means of doing so. There is no shame in that — it is just you following with the progression of time and technology. However, if you’re a little something like myself, you want to have what feels like a “home” on the web. It isn’t an impossible dream; to elaborate, you don’t have to be a Computer Science major to code a website. I promise you, there were 11-year-old children doing it on their mom’s out-of-date Macintosh. Even if it doesn’t get you far, I recommend trying it out — just once — to learn a little something about yourself. Get your hands dirty with poorly-written HTML.

No, the World Wide Web is not as broad and creative as it used to be. However, with a little bit of effort, and even in singularity, the web can go back to looking like a mod-podged collaboration of passionate hearts.

:) ♡

Works Cited

https://phys.org/news/2009-10-yahoo-geocities.html. Accessed 28 February 2025.

despens. “Birdseye view on www.geocities.com.” One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, despens, 06 10 2012,

https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/3297. Accessed 27 February 2025.

Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder. “The Web as History.” Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present, UCL Press, 2017,

https://ucldigitalpress.co.uk/Book/Article/45/70/3456/. Accessed 26 February 2025.

“GeoHoods.” Blade's Place,

https://www.bladesplace.id.au/geocities-neighborhoods-suburbs.html. Accessed 27 February 2025.

Jain, Sandeep. “Difference Between Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.” GeeksforGeeks, 20 September 2024,

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-with-their-difference/. Accessed 26 February 2025.

Maden, Emma. “We found love in a fictional place.” CULTURE, 18 December 2019,

https://theoutline.com/post/8442/internet-nostalgia-2010s-geocities-tumblr-vaporwave?zd=2&zi=fc63axhe. Accessed 27 February 2025.

Motavalli, John. Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the

Internet. Viking, 2002. Accessed 26 February 2025.

olia. “Some remarks on #neocities @kyledrake ⁋ by olia.” One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, olia, 07 01 2013,

https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/4012. Accessed 23 February 2025.

“One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age.” One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the Geocities Torrent, olia, 6 March 2024,

https://blog.geocities.institute/. Accessed 26 February 2025.

Stanton, Brandon. “I made my first website with a friend when I was in 7th grade. It was called Gaming Galaxy Online.” Facebook, Humans of New York, 10 August 2013,

https://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork/photos/a.102107073196735.4429.102099916530784/502016816539090/?type=3&theater. Accessed 20 February 2025.

VoyageLA. “Meet David Bohnett of Baroda Ventures in Beverly Hills.” VoyageLA, VoyageLA, 10 July 2018,

https://voyagela.com/interview/meet-david-bohnett-baroda-ventures-beverly-hills/. Accessed 17 February 2025.

Yahoo! “GeoCities will close later this year.” Yahoo!, Yahoo!, 23 April 2009,

https://web.archive.org/web/20090426180227/http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html. Accessed 28 February 2025.