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.)
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...
I remember feeling like a webdesign master when I figured out frames. I was always more of a backend guy (perl + CGI = ❤️), but frames enabled me to produce pretty decent looking websites.