GeoCities websites have been offline since Yahoo closed GeoCities on 26 October 2009. GeoCities Japan followed on 31 March 2019. Archive Team copied almost a terabyte of the pages before the shutdown, and mirrors such as oocities.org still show them. Joey, founder of Bigfoot Web Solutions, a Melbourne web design agency, built her first sites on GeoCities.
Ah, 1995, when the internet was still new, wild and just a little bit ugly. That was the year I first dipped my toes into web design, armed with an upgraded 486 computer, a brand new 28.8kbps modem and a GeoCities account. It wasn’t sleek, it wasn’t professional, but wow, was it fun.
I still remember that dial-up tone (oh, the patience we had!) and the hours I spent after school, hunched over the computer, hyper-focused on the ultimate digital frontier: GeoCities. For those of you who weren’t around for this beautiful mess, GeoCities was one of the first platforms that let everyday people like me build a website for free, with the pages filed into themed neighbourhoods. The pages were gloriously chaotic. Blinking text, animated GIFs, neon colours and all the design choices we’d cringe at today. But for me, it was magic.
The source code rabbit hole
You know how some kids get obsessed with superheroes or sports? For me, it was source code. The browser had a View Source option tucked in its menu, and I would spend hours on other people’s GeoCities pages, dissecting the HTML like it was a treasure map to a hidden world.
Every <table> and <font> tag was a building block in the digital kingdom I was constructing. I wasn’t just making websites. I was figuring out how the web worked.
GeoCities: the original playground for bad website design (and that’s okay)
Let’s be real. Most of those GeoCities sites were not examples of good design. But that’s part of the charm, right? These days I’m hooked on One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, a Tumblr that has posted a screenshot of a rescued GeoCities page every 20 minutes since February 2013, each one shown in an old browser window.
It’s like a time capsule of the ’90s internet: a wonderful mishmash of clashing colours, Comic Sans and pixelated clip art. It’s so bad that it’s good. Each page reminds me of that creative freedom we had before things got all… professional.
Is GeoCities still around?
Not the original. Yahoo bought GeoCities in January 1999, announced in April 2009 that it would close it, and shut it down on 26 October 2009. GeoCities was more than a platform. For millions of people it was the first place they made a website and shared it with the world, and in one go, it was gone.
Not everything was lost, though. Between the announcement and the closure, volunteers from Archive Team copied almost a terabyte of GeoCities pages, and they released the lot as a torrent a year to the day after the shutdown. Net artist Olia Lialina and digital conservator Dragan Espenschied downloaded it and have been working through it ever since. One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is their project, keeping this quirky piece of digital history alive one screenshot at a time.
GeoCities Japan, which Yahoo Japan kept running after 2009, lasted until 31 March 2019. Today, mirror sites such as oocities.org and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine still show many of the old pages. And if you’d like to build one of your own, Neocities has offered free hosting for handmade HTML websites since 2013.
Sharing the nostalgia
There’s something so pure about those early days of the web, before we had to worry about UX, SEO or mobile responsiveness. It was just about making something, no matter how it looked. And I think that’s why I still love web design, and why I build websites for Melbourne businesses today. The tools are fancier now, but the thrill of creating something from nothing? That’s exactly the same.
For a trip down memory lane, GeoCities Institute is the research blog where Olia and Dragan write up what they find in the archive. It’s like opening a digital scrapbook of GeoCities websites, and trust me, you’ll get a kick out of it!
