Before the Internet Got Cool

The first site I ever made was neon green text on a flashing orange background with animated GIFs I ripped from a Sailor Moon fan page. It was GeoCities, 1997 or so, and I had no idea what I was doing.

GeoCities was the hot shit back then. From 1994 onwards, anyone could grab a free domain tucked into some themed neighborhood and build a website with whatever obsessed them—no gatekeepers, no algorithms, no editorial board. You could just make something and put it on the internet, full stop.

Every site looked like it came from a fever dream. Sailor Moon GIFs spinning in the corners. MIDI files playing automatically when you landed on the page, impossible to mute. Hit counters like vanity projects. Guestbooks collecting spam. An Under Construction banner because the site was never actually finished. Comic Sans everywhere. Hot pink and lime green at full saturation. The unspoken rule was: more was better.

The design aesthetic now seems utterly insane—maximalist to the point of active hostility. But that was exactly the appeal. You filled your space with everything you cared about, formatting be damned. No curators. No algorithm deciding what you’d see. Just people making weird little corners of the internet for themselves.

Cameron’s World preserves some of these old sites in an archive—a museum of early web that captures how goofy and sincere it all was. Which is to say: it was terrible, and that was completely the point.

What’s strange is remembering how low the stakes felt. You weren’t building a brand or watching metrics. You made a website because you had something to say or just because you could, and that lack of pressure meant people actually took risks. Built weird shit. Made things that mattered to maybe three other people on Earth. That felt like enough.