i miss websites that were allowed to be weird.
not “the old internet was better,” exactly. the old internet was frequently worse in ways we have either forgotten or converted into charming anecdotes because nobody wants to remember waiting three minutes for a midi file to load. pages broke if you looked at them from the wrong browser. navigation was a scavenger hunt. half the images were red x’s. somebody would choose yellow text on a tiled photograph of lightning and then make you live with their decision.
Geocities was not good design. that was the point.
it was a place where people made websites because they wanted a place for their Sailor Moon GIF collection, or an exhaustive explanation of why one particular episode of Star Trek pissed them off, or photographs of every frog figurine they had acquired since 1987. the page did not need to become a business. it did not need a content strategy. it needed a starfield background, a guestbook, and perhaps a tiny animated wizard pointing toward the links page.
the web used to look like somebody lived there
the thing i miss is not dial-up, browser incompatibility, or having to guess whether “enter” was hidden inside the spinning skull. i miss the evidence of a person making choices without asking whether those choices scaled.
a personal homepage could be pink because the person liked pink. it could have twelve sections because they had twelve interests. it could open with a 900-word argument about captain janeway and then direct you to a page of adopted digital pets. none of this was coherent in the modern branding sense, but it was perfectly coherent as a person.
you could tell when someone had learned a new trick because suddenly every heading had a drop shadow. you could tell when they found a GIF archive because the page began moving like a slot machine during an earthquake. you could tell what they cared about because they had spent six evenings arranging it into nested tables for an audience that may have consisted of their cousin, two people from a message board, and themselves at the public library.
this is, frankly, a healthier audience model than most of us have now.
bad design can still be honest design
we tend to talk about those pages as ugly, and many of them were. they were also legible in a way the modern web often is not. not legible as in “the contrast passed an accessibility audit”—it absolutely did not—but legible as an artifact of somebody’s attention.
the glittering rose divider meant something. the painstaking shrine to a minor anime character meant something. even the page that played “my heart will go on” without consent was making a recognizable human choice, albeit one that should have been prosecuted at the hague.
today, even personal sites arrive wearing business casual. there is the large tasteful photograph, the sentence explaining who i am and what value i provide, the pill-shaped button, the three cards, the newsletter box, and the footer containing several tiny legal obligations. everything has excellent spacing. everything loads properly. everything looks prepared to ask whether i have fifteen minutes for a quick introductory call.
the modern web is dramatically more competent and somehow looks like six websites.
competence became a dress code
this did not happen because designers became boring. designers got very good, browsers became less adversarial, phones turned every layout into a negotiation, and accessibility finally began receiving something closer to the attention it always deserved. a modern site has to work across an absurd range of screens, input methods, network conditions, and human needs. there are good reasons not to construct your navigation from eight unlabeled GIFs of gemstones.
but somewhere between “please let people use the website” and “please make every website a frictionless conversion surface,” competence became a dress code.
templates lowered the barrier to making something functional, which is good. platforms then replaced most of the decisions with defaults, which is convenient. recommendation systems rewarded whatever could be understood immediately, which is efficient. eventually we arrived at a web where enormous numbers of people technically publish all day without ever making a place of their own.
we post inside rooms where the landlord chose the paint, the furniture, the maximum number of characters, and which of our friends are allowed to see us. then the landlord moves the furniture every six months because engagement is down.
the problem is not that every person should learn html and hand-code a shrine to their favorite wrestler. the problem is that the available tools increasingly treat personality as something to pour into a slot after the structure has already been decided.
i do not want the inconvenience back
nostalgia becomes useless the second it starts lying. the old web was not a democratic garden where everybody had equal access and corporations politely stayed outside the gate. hosting cost money. technical knowledge mattered. search was inconsistent. harassment existed. accessibility was often treated as an exotic rumor. plenty of people never got to participate at all.
i do not want to restore the internet from a backup dated 1998. i want the current web—with responsive layouts, readable type, alt text, fast connections, useful standards, and buttons that behave like buttons—to loosen its tie.
keep the competence. bring back the permission.
make a page that exists because you own seventeen pictures of the same cat asleep in different containers. write the definitive case against one episode of a television show that ended twenty years ago. use a color that a brand strategist would describe as “challenging.” add a links page for no reason except that you like those links and would like them to continue existing somewhere.
this is also why i keep returning to the idea that a personal website should contain too many subjects and have a name you need to explain. the mess is not a preliminary stage before the site discovers its niche. the mess is the biography.
the handmade web is still here
the weird web never vanished completely. it moved into small blogs, fan wikis, neocities pages, handcrafted portfolios, strange little tools, newsletter archives, and personal domains updated whenever their owners remember the password. you still find pages that feel less like publications and more like being invited into somebody’s bedroom while they explain the complete taxonomy of a thing you had not thought about since 2004.
those pages are not valuable because they are retro. they are valuable because they are specific.
specificity is what the six-websites web keeps sanding off. it cannot be reliably templated because it lives in the unnecessary choices: the odd title, the overlong sidebar, the tiny collection nobody searched for, the joke that makes sense to four readers, and the page made solely because its author woke up furious at commander chakotay.
i would like more of that. not a worse internet. not a slower internet. just an internet where a website can look like somebody got excited and stayed up too late.