1990s

Following the 1980s and preceding the 2000s.

The 1990s was the decade when the web was invented and grew, dominated by independent websites, a few silos like Geocities, with brightly colored and often translucent design aesthetic that would come to define the era, eventually as retro or retroweb, along with under construction graphics, dancing animals, site counters, ornate backgrounds, and guest books.

Why

Aesthetics from the 1990s, especially on websites, are a popular form of nostalgia that harken back to when the web was much quirkier, weirder, and more diverse, across a plethora of independent sites exploring a new medium without strict rules or expectations.

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki archived the version of his website that was online from 1999-2003 at http://2003.aaronparecki.com

Astrid Yu has a funky 90s-style 88x31 banner of her site.
Kimberly Hirsh has found some sites she developed in the 1990s preserved on the Internet Archive:
Tantek Çelik started his personal site tantek.com in the 1990s.
Dr. Matt Lee had various webpages in various places from 1993 onwards before getting a domain name in the 90s.
- https://mat.tl/archive/1994.htm is a copy of the site within the first year found on a floppy disk.
Jeffrey Zeldman of https://zeldman.com/ started his website and blog in 1995, many top level pages:
Joe Crawford has copies of websites archived (including markup to assure they look now as they did then)
- from geocities.com/SoHo/3384
- from home.earthlink.net/~artlung/

Other Examples

Good blog/news stream design example: https://web.archive.org/web/19970220031619/http://www.mmcorp.com/mmcsite/news/news.html

Aesthetic Examples

Examples of sites newer than the 1990s that mimic a 1990s aesthetic:

https://melonking.net

Silo Examples

Angelfire was established in 1996 and is still running least some of its original services (allowing for updates), while supporting links to user profiles

Archived Examples

Web Design Exhibitions: screenshots of famous websites at various periods in time in the 1990s, from Pizza Hut to Apple.
GifCities: A website owned by the Internet Archive that is dedicated to surfacing GIFs from GeoCities.
ISP Netscape (archived)

Articles

2020-06-18 Max Böck: The Return of the 90s Web
2020-12-03 10 Things That Used to Be on Every Website That You Totally Forgot About

Images

https://twitter.com/cybrxangel/status/1546598639698677763
technology design peaked here

@cybrxangel July 11, 2022
...

Tools

icons for a 1990s "silk" vibe: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

nostalgia
timeline
Yesterweb
A search engine for *old* websites: http://oldavista.com
Logos of 1996 era W3C Members: https://twitter.com/koalie/status/1421140473943560194
- "Here's the time capsule of @w3c members from 25 years, 3 months ago (April 1996) https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/IconList.html" @koalie July 30, 2021
history
Web design house https://dayjob.work/ has a 1990s-era Windows desktop design, and was also responsible for building the site https://flybyjing.com/ which also has aspects of 1990s-era web design such as its bright non-primary colors and marquee heading (though implemented in CSS) while also having a responsive layout.
ID4
https://www.geocities.ws/oldternet/
“read, write, own” web ⁋ by olia
2024-03-13 Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again / Dial-Up Modems Can Stay in the Past Tho…
90s era reviews and site design left as is to the present: http://www.roughedge.com/
Archive of 1997 website reviews on video

IndieWeb over the decades
Decades	1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s • 2010s • 2020s • IndieWebCamps over the years

https://cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-1999/
1990s web site designs were dominated by HTML Table based layouts, with a few cutting edge websites using CSS float which only worked in a few browsers.

Why