Geocities is finally, after nearly fifteen years, bowing its head and closing its doors. While the first reactions of many, like myself, was, "it's about time;" others embraced the nostalgia of their first websites in the nineties - full of animated gifs, enormous counters, midi tunes, frames, tables, ... the list goes on and on. With that said, we can all agree on one thing if we're truly honest with ourselves: this closure is long overdue!
1. Homesteading
One of the first things that everyone thinks about when they hear "Geocities" is the long and memorable (albeit annoying) site paths, known as homesteading. When Geocities first started, there were a mere 6 neighborhoods, which included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood". They were great, allowing newcomers of personal homepages to fantasize about the new cyber world they were about to enter. Within a year, 23 more neighborhoods popped up along with the terrible headache of explaining what neighborhood, suburb, and 4-digit number your webpage was located at. Luckily by 1999, Yahoo had taken over and switched the homestead URL scheme to the more modernly used vanity URLs. But even though the lengthy URLs have been long gone for 10 years, their association with Geocities remains remnant enough to be the first reason why the closing of Geocities is long overdue.
2. 15 Megabytes
Back in the 90's, 15 megabytes was more than enough to store your 5 page website; not to mention the ten 640*480 JPEG pictures from your digital camera. It was even enough to host MP3s for your friends to check out before deciding to download this thing called Napster for themselves. It was a much simpler time back then, when data exchange would still often occur on 3.5" floppy disks. But in this day and age of broadband and Hi-Def streaming, running a website off of 15 megabytes of webspace is barely enough to host a decent Wordpress blog for a month. I mean, let's face it, even emails have had larger space limits for years now. 15 megabytes just doesn't cut it anymore.
3. SPAM
I haven't actually experienced much Geocities spam sites personally, as Gmail filters my spam mail pretty robustly. But many users have complained about a large number of Geocities webpages hosted purely to bypass spam mail filters which block out dangerous links. These Geocities pages would redirect users to a target URL, by using cleverly encrypted javascript. (source: Spamtrackers.eu)
4. Color Choice
While nobody really got the hang of webpage design in the 90's, Geocities site owners seemed to master the art of amateur design. One of the requirements for starting a page that I must have missed was having no sense of color coordination. For some reason the use of multicolored neon text on busy tiled background images were a popular choice. This usually turned out to be better, letting you know that the content wasn't worth reading anyway.
5. Abandoned Webpages
I'll admit that I was part of the cause for this reason, but Geocities became infamous for abandoned webpages in the early 00's. People such as myself, would create accounts and build webpages just to host pictures and MP3s for friends to download (as mentioned in Reason 2: 15 Megabytes). This type of abuse led to thousands of empty webpages and parked sites that lead to much wasted google indexing and disappointing clickthroughs.
6. Under Construction
This one sort of relates to Reason 5: Abandoned Webpages. Chances were, if you didn't stumble upon an abandoned webpage, you probably came across a webpage forever under construction. Many users new to website building only made it far enough to make a new site with the obligatory "This is my site." text. Soon after, that website would be long forgotten while the owner moved on to LiveJournal or Xanga.
7. Splash Pages
Sometime toward the end of the century, people discovered the ease of Flash, allowing simple animations of images and text. Then *BOOM*, you suddently could no longer visit a webpage without having to sit through 15 seconds of bouncing images and scrolling text. Fortunately, this trend only stuck around for a few years.
8. Homepage Banners
Webpages of the 90's really only had two main layouts: navigation on the top, and navigation on the left. But the one thing that both layouts would share was a big rectangular homepage banner placed at the top.
9. MIDIs
Though this is probably more of a Xanga "thing" these days, Geocities was one of the first to start the use of using MIDIs as background music for homepages. Before the popularity and accessibility of MP3s, MIDIs were the popular file format for music due to their small file sizes. However the tones of synthesized horns and keyboards got old and annoying very quickly. There's nothing that opitomizes Web 1.0 for me than a happy birthday midi playing.
10. Animated GIFs
If there was only one reason the closing of Geocities is long overdue, it'd definitely have to be the animated GIFs most associated with the Geocities name. Love them or hate them, you can't help but remember the once trendy craze of pixelated animations. They'd slow down your browsing to a crawl, and really test your patience. From the rotating 3D text to the dancing clipart images, Geocities was flooded beyond belief with these lagging monstrocities.
Farewell
Without further ado, we bid you farewell, Geocities. As we push your cardboard box into the sea, let's take a look at some especially awful Geocities sites. (Be sure to leave a comment with yours, and I'll update the posting!) - Jeffrey
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Chris October 26th
It’s the ‘official’ end to an era. Glad it is over.
( )Kennedy October 26th
Much better then my submission!
( )ziggidy October 26th
i know right! haha
pfftt
( )Thomas Drake-Brockman October 26th
Same here
( )Latavish October 26th
oh wow..I totally forgotten about MIDI’s! This post brought back some memories.
( )Anthony Cook October 26th
Wow! that was epic
( )Dailypush October 26th
oh memories… I think some pages can still be found in the “Way back machine”
( )Ben Carroll October 26th
To bad my article didn’t get selected. Anyways great article Joseph enjoyed reading. Much better than mine
( )Joseph Rosario October 26th
Thanks for the compliment, Ben.
I wish I had a little more time to revise it. My mind was shutting down by the time I tired to look for images.
( )Braden Keith October 26th
“xkcd has been redesigned” hahahah!
( )Daniel October 26th
I thought XKCD’s tribute today was truly brilliant!
But I have to ask, what about all the useful information on Geocities? I know it was mostly animated gifs and under construction banners, but I’vee found myself reading manuals for old electronics on there that people have transcribed for some bizarre reason.
( )tykho_ October 26th
This is amazing, I miss the good old times.
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:uEjYGPX8CNcJ:www.geocities.com/pokemontours/+pokemon%2Bgeocities&cd=3&hl=sv&ct=clnk&gl=se
( )Ian October 26th
Lol that was interesting (:
( )adrusi October 26th
I didn’t know that XKCD was ever on geocities =O
( )SomeOneOutThere October 26th
it wasn’t
( )Randall just redesigned the page as a tribute to geocities
Hamza Oza October 26th
Wow. Never knew it was hated that much.
( )rob October 26th
what Daniel says is so true you can find a variety of weird stuff in there! it’s going to be gone!
( )Alex Stultz October 26th
NOOO!!! I hope all my old sites don’t go down. I need to save them before they do. Still, I can’t believe it has been so long. I remember being a kid with no money and building sites with Geocities, and now I’m a full-time web developer. Funny world.
( )Rijalul Fikri October 26th
Ah .. good ol’ memories
( )TKawai October 26th
Woah, I didn’t even realize Geocities was still around. I wish I still remembered my site since it was quite ghastly.. Aaaah, the good ol’ 90’s. Such simpler times.
( )Shane October 26th
If you ask me (and nobody is, but I’ll continue anyway), MySpace isn’t too different in some ways. The design of some people’s pages is absolutely ridiculous!
( )Crysfel October 26th
totally agree with you!!
( )Shane October 26th
Best viewed in IE 6.0 at 800×600 etc.
Alexander October 26th
Indeed!
sean steezy October 26th
haha yeah… esp with the poor color choices and tiled backgrounds some pages are considered a bit of a clusterf*ck
( )Craigsnedeker October 26th
Haha another reason i dont use them
( )Meshach October 26th
Yeah, I hate myspace!
Ash Smith October 26th
I was thinking the exact same thing! Damn, haven’t been on myspace for like 2 years now!
( )Meshach October 26th
LOL, good riddance!
( )Joe October 26th
check out this: someone is trying to recover GeoCities over here: http://www.reocities.com
( )Dan October 26th
MySpace.com will be experiencing the same thing within a few years. One hopes. haha
( )Nathan October 26th
Finally! I mean yea, it’s end of an era, but at least the net just got rid of some trash
. No one really need “this page doesn’t exists anymore” pages.
( )underpk October 26th
I built my first website there and it was totally crap lol! But that inspired me to be the webmaster.
( )alan October 26th
Oh man.I’ve build my first web site there.
( )lee October 26th
me too. hahaha
Michael Dick October 26th
Regardless, all ten of these items were the style back then and remains a part of history. I don’t agree with this article.
( )Mountain Pixel October 26th
Like many others, I built my first site at geocities in the late ’90s and it got me interested in web design and programming so it is bitter-sweet to see it go.
( )Michael October 26th
nice.. one less, some more to go
( )Reimu October 26th
Very nice, brings me back to the good ol’ days! Now hopefully Piczo.com will be the next to go!
( )David B October 26th
Now we need to work on getting rid of IE 6
( )DataMouse October 26th
Here here
( )Johnny Freeman October 26th
Just IE 6? What would web development be like without a separate style sheetfilled with unnecessary hacks?
( )Craigsnedeker October 26th
Not sad to see them go at all. Same with yahoo, frames and tabls are their thing, they gotta go next.
Webs, live long and prosper!
( )Erik October 26th
Hooray for the end of the bane of web design! Let us now usher in a new era of even more awesomeness.
Also: under MIDI, the last sentence says “opitomizes”. Took me a minute of reading out loud trying to decide if it was supposed to be “epitomizes” or “optimizes”
( )Michael October 26th
Ahhh… those were the days
( )Avery October 26th
It was only about 2 years ago that I used that site to put my portfolio online. Although their page builder was slow to use it was still pretty effective as long as you didn’t use any of the cheesy effects (in that regard Geocities is no worse than Photoshop). My only issue with it was that everything loaded so slowly which made me switch over to carbonmade.
No shout outs for Angelfire? heh
( )Anon October 26th
now to kill Tripod and Angelfire.
( )BebopDesigner October 26th
Ha ha ha!
I really enjoyed this post! Thanks for sharing these memories
( )Eric B. October 26th
xkcd’s way of commemorating this event was pretty awesome!
The source starts with:
( )<HTML WEB=”2.0″>
Ben Williams October 26th
Its kinda sad to see it leave.
( )It was a classic
w1sh October 26th
Yeah really. To Hell with all these people who are glad it’s going. GeoCities and GeoCities Help Chat (which conveniently just pointed you straight to HTMLGoodies for every question you had) were integral us all getting into web-design/development.
What a bunch of ungrateful jerks.
( )Ben Williams October 26th
i know like who didnt start off with geocities. Its every persons first dream 2 have ur own page that you can show people.
Drew Douglass October 26th
I agree, if it wasn’t for geocities, I’m not sure if I would have ever gotten into this field. Was it ridiculous? Yes. Am I glad it’s gone? Not at all.
( )chack October 26th
myspace beta?
( )Mark Sinkinson October 26th
Apparently I still have a Geocities website
It’s good to reminisce, R.I.P. Geocities
( )chng_amanda October 26th
Those were the days when I created my first web. Let it go…………..
( )We still have other free webs where we can create a better pro looking site with many more new gadgets and etc.
There’s a end for everything…………..
gooflett October 26th
Losing Geocities is like what it would feel like if Wendy’s fast food restaurant closed. You went there when you were a kid but when you returned as an adult it felt old and dirty.
R.I.P. Geocities the home of the HAMSTER DANCE
( )josheat October 26th
yeah… geocities got me started on web design.
Now I work full time in the field, so I don’t have much hatred towards it. Just tons of nostalgia!
I wonder, what will be the next geocities?
( )Nettogrof October 27th
Facebook ?
( )blackabee October 26th
’bout bloody time
( )Fenson J. October 26th
OH MAN! I think I still have a few test sites running loose in Geocities. It’s been about 10 years since I last made them as a kid. Probably got automatically deleted. Still, Geocities is one of those sites that got me really started on making websites.
( )Ricardo October 26th
Don’t worry, there’s still Angelfire to get your bad site fix!
http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
( )Toffeenut October 26th
LOL! Nostalgia.
( )Natrium October 27th
this one is mine: http://geocities.com/isthioth/ (it’s in dutch)
( )Bleyder October 27th
Déjà vu
( )Stephen Webb October 27th
Just the word Geocities brings back memories of when websites were in their first steps, the web was a new idea, and the dot com bubble hadn’t yet burst. It’s amazing how much changes until you look back, and clearly by looking back at those examples it seems everything has changed.
What I found particularly surprising about the article is that all this happened in only ten years or so, yet back then there was no Flash (or at least not as we know it now), very little music (everything was MIDI), and obviously no video whatsoever (just the idea of downloading video seemed impossible on 56k modems!).
It makes you wonder what the next ten years will bring in the webs development. With the ever increasing speed of broadband globally, computer displays getting ever bigger and more vibrant, and interaction becoming a key feature of the web, the next ten years could see an equal rate of progression!
( )Foss October 27th
The closure of Geocities was a terrible idea! Sure, there was a lot of rubbish on there, but there was also a lot of useful information and a lot of memories. How many broken links have Yahoo created by removing Geocities? How many Geocities websites were created by people who have since died? It’s a piece of history, and a reflection of the state of the Internet at that time. Yahoo should at least have made a proper backup or snapshot of the site, but all they did was point archive.org in the right direction and say “get on with it”.
As Jason Scott puts it: “Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.” http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1956
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2280
( )hannon October 27th
Those days… its quite funny how things go, you start with a graphic interface such as netscape composer, then I turned to HomeSite (today’s dreamweaver¿?) and finally ended with a simple text editor.
( )I do miss midi on web.
Porteña October 27th
Hahaha, nice days! I’ve been started in the HTML code business with these “personal homepages”, I used to build for friends and relations. I had one but not in Geocities, it had a very loooonger name that I can’t rememeber now.
By the way, remember the and tags?
Hugs from someplace in B.A. city
( )Don Behm October 27th
RIP Atari 2600 of the web.
( )digibomb October 27th
I think I had like 5 or 6 geocities sites at one time…man…the good old days of free web hosting…
i wonder what happened to my pages…
( )Lakeshia Burnside October 27th
Now if they just do the same with IE6 i will be a happy camper!
( )k77 October 27th
There are many good Geocities sites. I used it back in the day. This post is very opinionated and I completely disagree with “long overdue” it should stay active but stop taking new accounts. So much good content will be lost.
Disagree completely
( )willian October 27th
truth is: one day we’ll all laugh at ours todays designs…
( )jack October 27th
Never had a geocities. I was a matmice guy.
( )Dennis October 27th
Using all the reasons above, MySpace should be next to go. It’s an absolutely horrid method of allowing people to generate their own profile pages and the designs therein follow the same guidelines of extreme annoyance that GeoCities users followed.
( )esranull October 27th
thanks for sharring
( )Sebastian Bratu October 27th
While many designers and modern people would like to throw away old things, we must not forget there is a whole history in there. There should be a museum about this. I hope they would put many in archive.org.
It’s no good when after 10 or 20 years you throw away your history … Our kids and nephews would not know how to use a cassette player. And it’s a shame … too bad
( )pixelsoul October 27th
I agree mostly. Does not hurt to put it up somewhere on a shelf BUT… lets get pushed out of the way so it’s not blocking our view of the rest of the web.
This is why I love the wayback machine.
( )g3niuz October 27th
i can just imagine the old days .. ;D
nice oldskool stuff..
( )Alex October 27th
Very good! Oddly though, I have NEVER heard of Geocities till a few days ago (from @nettuts on twitter saying they would pay someone to write an article about it closing!)
( )myadlan October 27th
wow. its a touching entry. it was my second free web hosting after tripod.
( )ardianzzz October 27th
oh yes..
i remember my first website..
heheh
( )Omar October 27th
I think Geocities popped my web site cherry as well
( )Andy October 28th
Geocities got me into the whole website thing. I remember feeling so proud when I could use the HTML editor properly for the first time. xD
( )Jamie Brewer October 28th
Wish I could see my first geocities site again. I’m sure it would be a great laugh!
( )Paul Burgess October 28th
There are lots of comments here about people saying ‘Ah, the memories’, and they remember their first website etc.
Geocities is a brilliant piece of internet history that is getting wiped out.
It’s a real shame. Your reason for it being a good thing are mostly cos it looks bad – of course it does, that’s what’s great about it – it was 1999!
( )Bernd Artmüller October 28th
I even didn’t know about geocities, but it seems to be funny^^
( )Jarod October 28th
I’m not commenting to put them down, but they didn’t put in effort to attract more viewers anyhow, their fault. They had so many views from yahoo’s popularity, I just don’t understand how they could get to this place at the very last moment. To be honest, least i expected was for them to do some sort of up-rise again for another day of light. Good to know they aren’t stressing themselves now, I think they could of had a good income if they had better master minds behind there work now that I think of them as stressing =/.
( )Keith October 28th
Is this a tutorial or a comedy routine?
( )Keith October 28th
Ah, just realized it’s filed under articles.
( )Bargok October 29th
I used to build/host my websites at Geocities 10 years ago…with animated gifs, with midi playing, with frames and probably a amateur design and horrible pick of colors..
Great read, and great memories!
( )Kiran October 29th
Good old memories but this how I funnily started out and started learning about good practices… then the passion grew from someone else forcing you to edit it their way to using CSS and HTML to style it and place it my way.
I used to use freewebs but I think they are all the same league (personally I would include MySpace as well) however I do agree completely it is a good move!
( )Julianne of New Zealand October 30th
Awww, I did my first geocities site in 1995 or 96, it was at SoHo/Lofts. I made my own animations and graphics in the free programme that came with Windows 95. I didn’t have music as I hated the midi sound, but I did have a lot of brightly coloured graphics and a pale yellow background. Sounds bad, but hey, at least there was no comic sans. I thought I was pretty cool at the time, I was the first out of everyone I knew to have my own site – oh the prestige!!! Those were the days, we were pioneers. When Geocities emailed me and told me they were closing them down, I went and got all my files for old time’s sake.
( )Julianne of New Zealand October 30th
Oh my goodness, I found our second personal geocities site, they’ve put it at reocities here, how wonderful http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/lofts/2365/
My daughter in the photo was 2, and she is now nearly 15!!! And I am so pleased I kept her earlier pages, where I put her songs. Many strangers contacted us over the years when they googled a particular traditional Maori song she sings and they were looking for it and found her, and emailed us to tell us how cute she was singing it.
Yes, the site was hideous, but as people have been commenting, they are history. (Hopefully) we will never design like that again, but it is still valuable to have.
( )Vasjen Katro October 31st
That is cute!
Vasjen Katro October 31st
Im glad for this!
( )sarwara November 1st
haha, that was where I got started
dont even remember my sites there now lol
RIP Geocities , thats end of an era, good or bad.
( )cobragtk November 2nd
I am sad to see Geocities go. They offered FREE web hosting. Ok sure there were no bells and whistles but you had geocities.com/anyname, an easy to use web based file manager, and it was free! I feel like this article is more about web dev/design circa 1990. It’s always easy to make fun of things. Anyway, thank you Yahoo and Geocities.
( )Yunki Lin November 4th
yes glad it finally ends, but really have to say that I miss the good old days. when i was 15, I was so appreciate the Geocities provides the free 15MB web hosting ,and having my own website when i was aged 15 was a really good experience. R.I.P. Geocities,will miss u forever
( )ottawahitech November 8th
I completely disagree!
What you are basically saying is that it is OK to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Happily there are others out there who have gone to great lengths to preserve content built by millions of indivduals some of whom are no longer with us. Reocities, the archiveTeam and the Wayback machine come to mind.
( )Evan Skuthorpe November 11th
I remember geocities. when I first started out in web design as an amateur I hosted my first site on it. I agree though that it’s time to go.
( )