What should I add to my '90s website?

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

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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.

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

Iframes with more iframes inside.

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.

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!

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

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.

do you have a click counter at the bottom

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.

You need a dancing baby.

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

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.

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.

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

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

<marquee>some text</marquee>

<embed src="somesong.mid">

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!

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.

Don’t forget the creepy dancing baby

Design is too mobile responsive

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/

There is not enough contrast or too much contrast between your text and the background.

What I’m trying to say is that is too easy on the eyes to read the text. 😂

CSS Snowflakes

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

Custom curors that animate at rest and during loading so you're not sure which part of the curors clicks, and also not sure sure if something is being loaded or not. Bonus points if the cursor changes to yet another ambiguous animated one as you hover over a tiny button which would pause the midi track.

Can we have a globe please that magically spins?

It should work at 640x480 and no other resolution.

Needs a blink tag and some old style Microsoft Word art.

The midi file doesn't play automatically, but I see that's a thing your working on.

Also need gifs of Bart Simpson saying "Don't have a cow man"

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

Comic Sans MS

Background audio player that automatically plays some crusty grunge midis

Line by line loading images, maybe an error message saying the connection dropped with the modem sound playing to restart the page.

@ajsadauskas @linux Image maps? <marquee>? A digital view counter, or one of those gifs of a spinning odometer.
A link that goes to a clip art digger saying 'under construction' in 90s office clip art.

256 colors. Especially for that background. Or maybe even less and use dithering.

Guestbook didn't work, after recaptcha it just said POST failed. Oh and you need a visitor counter!

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy iframes - you definitely need them

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.

That cat is way too high res

Adobe flash.

Fun idea. ASCII Art!

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!

Spinning wordart!

BOOTSTRA.386 (okay, on second thought, that's more the 80s and doesn't really fit.)

use html tables with large borders ... or that is how I feel the old times look

Oh man -- you need a blink tag on some of that text. Support for the tag has been removed from all modern browsers.

So you'll need to add it in with javascript that updates CSS or something.

I had to go dig up the link again. Was looking for this folding license plate step thing I saw once, and found the sellers website. Looks like it is also straight out of the 90's

http://markthree.com/custom_vans_license_plate_steps.htm

I love it! Takes me right back. I was going to suggest adding a visitor counter but you already had it.

Needs more dancing Jesus

Put some more random badges on the bottom
This site has a lot of them: https://web.badges.world/

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy You need to change the mouse cursor to anything but an arrow. Bonus points if it leaves a trail. Like a peace sign cursor that leaves a rainbow trail, or a clock face where the numbers fall off when it moves.

Infinite popups, simulated of course now that most web browsers block popups.

http://theoldnet.com/

This is going on my bookmarks toolbar. Thank you!

You might get some useful ideas on !oldweb@lemmy.ml (although it seems abandoned now)

Add a visitor counter like this one - https://retrowptheme.com/retro-visitor-counter/

for more vintage gif's check this website - https://gifcities.org

One of those Java applets at the bottom that looks like water reflecting the site background perhaps?

The problem is the MIDI file doesn't automatically play.

https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Homer's_Web_Page

You need to offer something banal for download with a spinning stiffy disk gif.

You've got the under construction gif. Done.

I miss midis.

@ajsadauskas@aus.social @asklemmy@lemmy.ml uh, nice vibes!

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy (Trying to remember my own GeoCities site from back then), Many had a “best viewed on Netscape” icon

I think mine had mostly my own song lyrics, with a different background for each page, with a menu page and forward/back links on each lyrics page.

Were frames 90s? Friend of mine used frames to make his site look like a console from Star Trek TNG

It has a cat gif I don't think it needs anything else I'm sorry

≤blink>

@ajsadauskas@aus.social @asklemmy@lemmy.ml I think I actually have a few of my 90s-era sites archived. One of them should have an auto play midi for the background music. I'll see if I can dig it up!

@ajsadauskas @neil @asklemmy Looks amazing!

My only question is about whether drop shadows on text was prominent. I’m having trouble remembering how that effect would have been accomplished in the 90s, since I don’t think CSS got it until later. Would it have been something on the <font> tag only supported in Internet Explorer?

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy
The Netscape logo at the bottom killed me

Check out maya.land. especially webmentions.

I don't know how to tag a user on lemmy. Is maya still around?

I'm also a big fan of confusing landing pages.

EDIT: an RSS feed for any website, old or new

You need to add some text with the RuneScape glow1:wave: text effect

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy

That's brilliant! Those were simpler times, that's for sure :)

Add a guest book a page vist counter and a web ring

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy neko cat website pet thing

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy
A little music player with a playlist that plays that eras music. Links to retro sites that no longer exist that actually work, that way we can bring the internet of the past back.

@ajsadauskas @asklemmy Frames

Nice project. I like the nostalgia. 👍

After some searching I learned that Tripod and Angelfire still exist today as web hosting providers. Your page could have a few more Under construction signs here and there.

I recommend a "gallery" of photos of whatever topic you want, but probably something obscure like your favorite McDonalds playgrounds or of you holding up fish you've caught. The resolution on the pictures can't more than 640x480 tho.

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The cat art style doesnt look 90ish to me