During my teenage years, GeoCities was all the rage. It was a free web-building and hosting platform filled with bright colors, pixelated images, faulty HTML, and conspicuously placed advertisements. After a couple of decades, it finally rested in peace in 2019.

In the 2000s, I did not know HTML and would have thought it was an abbreviation for Hotmail, the email service. By the 2000s, when I entered the picture, GeoCities was a website builder, although fairly poorly equipped compared to today’s website builders. Without any background in coding, website creation boils down to inserting elements in place on a page like scrapbook stickers.

My first website, Kidds of West Riding Yorkshire and Pittsburgh, PA, devoted to my family history, showed many hallmarks of GeoCities’ outdated web design.

• The navigation menu on the homepage included multiple dead links to web pages I intended to create but never did. Dead links also include other people’s websites that no longer exist.
• Background images obscure some of the text. Notably in My Barker Branch, the tendrils of the vines shade parts of the text. Covered text appears again on another page with a starry banner running roughshod over text like tire tracks.
• The same page has an image-won’t-load icon greeting visitors.
• All the links are red, which in website-speak indicates that the linked-to webpage does not exist. In other words, with red links, I told the internet that none of my website’s links worked

Finally, viewing old GeoCities websites can be dangerous. A company, Geocities.ws, has published many older GeoCities websites, but truly, it’s a scam website. If you inadvertently click on the link to an old site, you might find your antivirus software blocking access (or hopefully it does, because if you link with the site, you might soon find your computer infected with malware). The safest way to view a GeoCities website is to use Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.