Asklemmy

You 100% need a visitor counter at the bottom.

Why are there no sparkles that follow my mousepointer?

Remove adaptive formatting, fixed width everything. Why should you care about my browser and screen size? That was part of why the pages looked more clunky in later years: the increase in screen resolution were not taken into account, so that pages sat tinily in the top left of the screen. Generally, lack of useful formatting was widespread. Just writing the text into naked HTML, having a few links (in default blue/purple) and you're good to go. I'm not sure if bullet points were even used.

Once you add some content, put it into a default HTML table without added styling. I don't even know if browsers still display these shitty gray bars, but you saw them everywhere.

And if you want to look professional, of course use frames! Preferably with fixed sites, too much text in them and scrollbars everywhere...

:funnytagthatonlytranslatedtoanemojionaspecificbulletinboard:

Visitor counter

Absolutely needs a hit counter.

Are you in a webring with other 90's websites?

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.

Remember <marquee>? And maybe add some dancing hamsters?

Visitor counter

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

I was fully prepared for the experience from my teens. My first thought was "that loaded way too fast."

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.

Signed the guestbook :)

I think it could do with a very literal under construction image, with some sort of machinery- every website seemed under construction at the time!

Needs 300% more skull trumpet.

Iframes with more iframes inside.

there is a website for a pizza place in seattle whose website does this, maybe you can get some inspiration. dinos

Every link should open a separate pop up window. Add an under construction gif of a dude digging.

Awards! Everything had awards back then!

Page view counter!

Blinkies - those small gifs that blinked to give the impression of glitter.

iframes - precursor to divs, but definitely added that "only works in IE" feel.

More contrast between font color and background image - it's too easy to read.

12pt Times New Roman font - gotta squint to read and default font for everything

Flashy gif banner at your header and footer - bonus points if they're the same image

All urls default to underlined blue and purple.

Mouse cursor with trails. The more sparkles, the better.

Clip art. Clip art everywhere.

For the authentic experience, you need two versions of the site: An Internet Explorer version, and a Netscape version. The two browsers didn't support the same features back then, so a lot of sites would have two different versions.

Also run it on your own server and limit the transfer speed (can set a rate limit in the Nginx config) so it loads slowly :D

do you have a click counter at the bottom

You need a dancing baby.

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.

Uppercase all of your html elements in the markup. Image mapped links. A background that doesn't quite tile properly. Max width 800px

And like a gif of a skull opening his mouth that shows a flame "E-mail" materialize from it or something.

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.

Don’t forget at least one banner ad across the top, flashing obnoxiously

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.

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!

• Game Spot in 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961222024924/http://www.gamespot.com/
• America Online (AOL) in 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961220154856/aol.com
• Alta Vista in 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970509000911/http://www.altavista.com/
• Discovery in 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970330143007/discovery.com
• Nintendo in 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/19990125101631/http://www.nintendo.com/
• Tripod (web host like Geocities) in 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19990428013840/tripod.com

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.

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy Add a Web ring link … even if it’s just a link back to your site

some text

While the blink html element is no longer supported you could probably sprinkle some JS to toggle the visibility state on the marquee element to really bring back the same feel. It's just not the 90s without blink. Also, there needs to be a page that is just a bunch of links aligned using low res images and tables.

cursor trail!

Seems like it's missing one of those section break bars that's an animated rainbow

Don’t forget the creepy dancing baby

Design is too mobile responsive

Heres a site in the similar vain, https://anarchymeanything.com/

Guest book,

Webring

Visit counter

Good luck, i like the older internet so much nostalgia

You need this image:
http://hwg.org/images/lo-025.gif

You can even go all out and actually join legitimately: http://hwg.org/services/logo/