Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996

I urge everyone to click around that site a bit. It has everything: UFO conspiracy theories, 3d modeling, recipes, MS Paint drawings, horror stories, ...

sebphfx• 14 years ago

It's modern digital folk art!

jakubw• 14 years ago

Well, mine had falling snowflakes even when it was summer.

dexen• 14 years ago

zalew• 14 years ago

doesn't work for me

powertower• 14 years ago

google.com http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...

drpancake• 14 years ago

I thought it would come out the same.

mistercow• 14 years ago

It doesn't notice and remove border-radius tags, which made the experience particularly weird.

dutchbrit3• 14 years ago

I think you'll find it offers ultimate browsing experience in Netscape Navigator :)

finne• 14 years ago

I actually found myself quite liking the MIDI files....

merryandrew• 14 years ago

Yeah, I got to hear a really sweet Alanis Morissette tune. :) :/ :(

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

And here's to thinking that the media companies were scared of MIDI files 'sounding' like the copyrighted tunes they have.

RegEx• 14 years ago

I got some Sheryl Crow action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1OfNKorIKA

lucb1e• 14 years ago

Hey isn't that my website?! (Joke)

Well, mine had #0F0 for the background color and some copy/pasted javascripts (i.e. clock moving with the cursor). But yeah, pretty much the same style :) Must say that I did improve over the years.

jbigelow76• 14 years ago

I saw this title and thought somebody must have found my posting on oDesk looking for UI work.

randomdata• 14 years ago

This thread made me want to look for the website I made in 1996 as a 14 year old in the Wayback machine. Sadly, it was not available.

I did find my website made as a 16 year old. Unfortunately all of the images were missing. From what I remember, it was actually a pretty nice design. I think I'd still be proud of it if I had built it today.

kayoone• 14 years ago

Hm, i was 13 in 1996, now i am a fulltime web developer ;)

devth• 14 years ago

Me too! How strange. Sadly, SouthBeach/Breakers/3015 is no longer around.

bjornsteffanson• 14 years ago

I was also 13 in 1996 and am now a front-end web developer.

This brings back fond memories.

krausejj• 14 years ago

is someone going to be making this in ten years to show what websites looked like in 2012???

also - comic sans is classic. i predict a comeback.

groovy2shoes• 14 years ago

Comic Sans didn't disappear. It's just been hanging out at Microsoft Research.

kapitalx• 14 years ago

the Chip background acts as a 3d stereograms which was a good reminder of the 90s.

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1...

Applied to itself 4 times. So meta, that we have to go deeper.

fl3tch• 14 years ago

That is what Steve Jobs saw on acid.

monsterix2• 14 years ago

While it might sound funny, people out there really do design their pages like this only:

http://govindtiwari.blogspot.in/

Yeah, even today! [edited]

Maro• 14 years ago

That's one awesome site =)

I keep looking at it finding new WTFs...

monsterix2• 14 years ago

haha, don't blink your eyes!

minikomi• 14 years ago

Haha.. there's this gem as well. . . http://yvettesbridalformal.com/

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

It's funny, these geocities sites were horrible but they provided a way for people to express themselves on the web.

MySpace tapped into this also , allowing people to change their page background, have autoplaying music etc.

The facebook/Twitter came along and spoiled it by prioritizing usability. Now basically everyone has an online presence that looks identical to the point of being sterile. Hell even 90% of wordpress sites look exactly the same.

unalone• 14 years ago

You know, this is a really interesting point to make. I always loved Facebook because it cut back on the bullshit and emphasized data over everything. I wanted to use these services keep in touch with people, not to see them try and express themselves. But when you see too much data fly by it all starts to blur and look the same. It's easy to get cynical about people when all you see is the surface data they express about themselves – by default the least interesting things they could possibly share.

The legendary architect Christopher Alexander has a theory on how life flourishes: at its core is this idea that the world consists of overlapping "centers" – basically places where living things gather. Centers can overlap, so on Facebook your feed and your profile are each centers. By connecting centers, you encourage movement between them and a newer, greater center exists.

I feel that Facebook and Twitter are excellent at encouraging this movement between centers of data. But they're not good at making that data matter. MySpace and Geocities were awful at communication (remember MySpace bulletins?), but they were always about creating something unique for yourself, not about connecting you to anybody else.

Is there a way to do both at once? I'm not sure, but this is something I've been thinking about for a few years now. In high school I did some work for http://zoints.com, which was trying to create a network of connected forums to allow for both personal expression and information density, but their tool was way too cerebral for anybody else to catch on. The closest I think I've seen any site come to this is Tumblr, because it both allows for uniquely designed blogs and a central aggregator, but Tumblr is so bad at conversation that it makes holding lengthy conversations ugly and frustrating.

The theoretical solution to this would be to let users define their own centers: give them controls for looking at information in a unique way of their choosing. In a sense, this solution is the Internet, and things like email and RSS are how we connect disparate online entities, but those are very crude tools. The subtler interactions you allow for, the more you'll let people express themselves without getting in each others' ways – but it's hard to define just what these interactions ought to be.

Looking back I'd say the pinnacle (for me) was Facebook's Graffiti Wall app, back when apps were just starting to be a thing. People interacting through pictures and illustrations lent to much more creative back-and-forth than text ever did. But that wasn't ideal either. I love capturing and organizing information, but I agree with you that something's been lost. Reclaiming it without sacrificing the new will be an enormous challenge.

gojomo• 14 years ago

See also Venkatesh Rao's piece on 'plazas vs. warrens':

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-...

UrbanPat• 14 years ago

+1 for Christopher Alexander!

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

coin• 14 years ago

I recall someone explaining what Facebook was when it first launched. I was told "it's like MySpace but not obnoxious".

blafro• 14 years ago

A small price to pay for good taste. After all we have to represent ourselves to future generations not to mention aliens that accidentally bump into our internet.

pauldino• 14 years ago

This reminds me of my favorite episode of the show with zefrank. http://www.zefrank.com/thewiki/the_show:_07-14-06

dkarl• 14 years ago

I was at a SXSW panel discussion about user customizable interfaces a few years ago. Some of the panel participants said the expected things about UI difficulties and affordances and how amazed they were at the ingenuity of some of their customers who did things with their products they didn't even know were possible. An Apple guy was on the panel, and his take was different: "Apple has standards and a brand image to protect." He pulled up the black and red vampire-themed MySpace page of some chubby goth guy and proudly mocked him, saying, "Apple will never allow anyone to do this with any of our products." He spent a few moments scrolling through the page and pointing out the most embarrassing aspects of the design, really rubbing in what a tacky mess this poor guy made out of his MySpace page.

Who are the winners, the high-value brands? Apple and Facebook, who maintained control. Apple and Facebook can't stop their users from doing tacky things with their products (not yet, thank God) but they do make sure the carefully designed brand context is always visible and easily distinguishable from the user-generated content inside. Who are the losers, the low-value brands? MySpace and other companies who didn't maintain a strict distinction between their product and what users did with it.

jaylevitt• 14 years ago

Apple's being unintentionally ironic here. Their second attempt at an online service was eWorld, which was based around a modified AOL client talking to a modified AOL server. They took our client software, which looked like this:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CukACmTPP8Q/TxxdPO_B8HI/AAAAAAAADd...

and, using our existing UI tools, made it look like this:

http://www.ilenesmachine.com/eworld/images_eworld/eworldone....

We had no idea that was possible.

Lesson: You do want your users customizing the interface.. but only the right users.

brudgers• 14 years ago

I was not impressed with the conversion - until I scrolled down and saw Billzebub.

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2...

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

Sad but true.

OliverD• 14 years ago

that was an awesome time :D

duck• 14 years ago

A better title would be: Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made In 1996

yakko• 14 years ago

indecent :D

philjr• 14 years ago

Hey, I was 13 years old in 1996! That made me nostalgic for a website I designed around 1998 and I was surprised to find it was still online...

http://homepage.eircom.net/~nopatec/

Dreamweaver special :)

still can't find the geocities site I had in 1997 though...damn

LinaLauneBaer• 14 years ago

3) SuckingDiesel WebJex - 20 MB Space, 5 POP accounts. FTP access, cgi-bin.

I like this quote... :-)

bicknergseng• 14 years ago

I don't know that it takes anything special to make nytimes.com look like it's from yesteryear. The only thing it's missing really is some <blink> elements and that dancing baby.

Seriously though if they're going to stick with that column layout, they should look at how pinterest is presenting information.

pepijndevos• 14 years ago

I tried it on a website, but it did not change much...

necenzurat• 14 years ago

i really love Reposts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805452

corford2• 14 years ago

Ah memories :) Does anyone remember the javascript meme where you'd get people to click a form button and then it would pretend to format your C:\ drive?? My 1996/7 site had that :D

And web rings! I miss the old internet :'(

hluska• 14 years ago

Oh web rings!! And the format c:\ meme...what great memories!

Do you remember the "Through an incredible amount of programming, I wrote a script that will show you what time my VCR is set to"? meme? The user would click a link to a page that contained:

The good old days....

corford2• 14 years ago

Ha I don't remember that one but lol!

Everything was much more fun and innocent back then. It's definitely that that I miss the most from the early days of the web.

brk• 14 years ago

One of my favorites:

"I found this collection of files posted on a cybercrime website. Check and see if any of them are yours..."

Then there was a link that went to file://c:\ so the user would be browsing their own hard drive...

theycallmemorty• 14 years ago

As someone who was 13 in 1996, I wonder if in 2030 they'll have funny tools to "Make any webpage look like it was made by a 28 year-old in 2012"

Andrex• 14 years ago

Yeah, Bootstrap 17.0. :P

nosignal• 14 years ago

Rounded corners, drop shadows, subtle palettes with contrasting call to action buttons, several dozen social network sharing icons... Did I miss anything?

rtp• 14 years ago

A while ago I made this bookmarklet to easily geocitize a webpage:

https://gist.github.com/2141034

The code is quite dumb but it works rather well.

baxter• 14 years ago

As someone who was 13 years old in 1996, I take exception to this. It looks like it was made by an 11 year old in 1996.

astral303• 14 years ago

+1.

Back then at 13, I already knew the dancing baby was not cool.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Title is redundant. If anyone other than 13 year olds were designing websites in 1996 there certainly wasn't any evidence of it back then.

crisnoble• 14 years ago

best badge: "made with notepad, the right way!"

bretthardin• 14 years ago

Why is it when I type in drudgereport.com it looks the same.

spinchange• 14 years ago

The wonder tonic guy gives great Internet. I love his shady URL redirection service: http://www.shadyurl.com/

Andrenid• 14 years ago

Just seeing the footer, with the browser buttons and counter, gave me one of the craziest "chills up spine" nostalgia-flashbacks I've had in years.

That alone was worth the click.

rachelbaker• 14 years ago

No <blink> tag?

instakill• 14 years ago

Oh the nostalgia.

NanoWar• 14 years ago

The other way round would be a lot better: Make any Webpage from 1996 look like it was made in 2012! :)

Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996

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