Lol pretty god damn close. I remember always creating some sort of 90s website whether it was video game cheat codes, southpark, pokemon or whatever I was really feeling at that time. Later evolving into one of the scenes that I loved the most . The E/N (Everything/Nothing) or “blogs”. We called them E/N Sites because they consisted of content that was basically “everything” and “nothing“.
Here's what an e/n site would have looked like:
Don’t forget someone was always coming up with a new layout or v2 (version 2) of their site. Telling you that it was COMING SOON with a progress bar showing the percentage because you had to sit there and actually code. Not like today where AI can generate a CSS/HTML code within seconds.
Sites were just so much cooler back then it seemed. No matter what kind of site I was designing whether it was for a customer or personal I always brought an E/N style vibe; it seems like it just never left.
Man I really miss the 90's and early 2000's.
If a site dedicated to archiving AOL history had actually been built during the peak AOL era of the late 90s, it wouldn’t be a sleek, responsive archive. It would be a gloriously chaotic personal homepage hosted on a service like GeoCities (likely in the TimesSquare or SiliconValley neighborhoods) or tucked away in an AOL member web space ([members.aol.com/paste]. (Can’t forget Angelfire.com either).
The Visual Layout
- The Background: Either a pitch-black background to give it that “elite hacker” edge, or a heavily tiled, pixelated texture (like a starfield, a brick wall, or gray stone).
- The Banner: A massive, 3D-rendered text banner at the top created in CoolText or Xara3D, glowing in neon green or metallic chrome, reading:
=== Welcome to Paste's AOL Prog & Warez Palace ===. - The Entry Gate: Before you could even see the content, there would be an unironic splash page. It would feature a giant animated flaming skull or a spinning AOL logo, with bold text reading: “Optimized for Netscape Navigator 4.0 and 800×600 resolution. Click ENTER to come inside.”
Core Page Elements
The Navigation Menu: No CSS dropdowns here. It would be a jagged vertical stack of bevel-edged graphical buttons or a standard HTML borderless table.
The “Progs” Download Section: A bulleted list where every single item is preceded by a blinking yellow [NEW] graphic or a spinning [HOT] icon. The links wouldn’t lead to cloud storage; they would target raw .zip or .exe files hosted directly on the limited 2MB ISP allocation space, accompanied by text like: “Mass-mailer, punters, and chat room faders inside! Use at your own risk!”
- The Visual Flair:
- An animated marquee text scrolling across the bottom of the screen:
+++ Check back soon for the new Visual Basic 5.0 source code release!!! +++ - A row of spinning animated
.gifconstruction cones at the bottom of sections that weren’t finished yet, labeled “UNDER CONSTRUCTION.” - A massive, glowing green digital visitor counter proudly displaying something like
000421visits since May 1998.
- An animated marquee text scrolling across the bottom of the screen:
The Footer
At the very bottom, right next to a MIDI player widget playing a sequenced version of a popular rock track on loop, you’d find the ultimate status symbol of the 90s web: a row of 88×31 pixel button banners linking to elite web rings, an active guestbook link (“Sign my Guestbook or get punted!”), and a proud badge declaring “Made with Notepad.”
Around 2005/2006 I finally closed PASTE.WS which was my last “e/n scene” website / illegal warez, mp3, album sharing site as well as my blog.
