Working on a website for my sister. I got some grainy gifs and a visitor counter. What else?

"Under Construction"

"Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher"

"An error has occurred in the script on this page."

An image gallery for no apparent reason with photos of your pets and family with no apparent image size or dimension consistency.
Different fonts on everything often in different colours.
Random string of emojis that are not of the standard type (there wasn't a standard yet).
A background of a single colour or simple repeating pattern.

guest book

midi version of some popular (or relevant to whatever fandom the site is about) 90s song autoplaying and looping in the background

Repeating background texture that makes the text a bit hard to read. Begging visitors to sign the guestbook. 'Under construction' gif for pages that aren't done yet. Autoplay midi (probably not possible nowadays).

Dankpods the Youtuber made one. Take a look: https://www.dingusland.fun/

A page with links to your favorite web sites, usually some really popular sites everyone knows.

A FAQ page. Remember to have a snarky fourth wall breaking conversation with your own questions and answers. Don't actually provide any useful information.

An obnoxious MIDI file playing in the background.

Don't be afraid to add a lot of GIF images. Some sort of skull or that dancing baby are crucial.

If you really hate your users, implement the whole page in Shockwave.

Guest log.

Web rings.

“Secret” links like clicking on an unassuming graphic takes you to a secret page.

Contact info that includes a fax machine phone #

For me it's webrings. And, they're back. I'm in a hurry so fame l can't research for you, but, they exist.

Site map

Dancing baby gif somewhere on the page is a must.

A random button that directs you to "You Are An Idiot" hosted on albinoblacksheep.com
Bonus points if you can get it to look like it's still running on Shockwave flash

Maybe a geocities domain?

Scrolling text

Marquee

This guy's site: https://dannarchy.com/

Oh God no, I had forgotten all about that. That's just evil.

Do it, OP!

https://baccyflap.com/rsp/

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|         |                             |
|         |                             |
| Frame 1 |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|---------|                             |
|         |          Frame 3            |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
| Frame 2 |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
|         |                             |
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With a unsecured mysql database in the backend...

Web Ring link

You need a banner ad where you have to punch the monkey to win a prize, and it changes the mouse pointer icon.

From what I'd read about it, search engines have become kinda shit, focusing on SEO and paid sponsored results than actually showing what someone searched for, so some small websites form webrings to help people find similar websites/interests while they're on their site. I think it's pretty cute/fun.

At least one broken image somewhere

mystery-meat imagemap navigation

Sitemap

My partner has some ideas… https://brosgetstoked.neocities.org/

Lot of people on neocities.org use them!

Tell him my favorite is the "visitor number one" part.

I made one as well.

https://sims2anin.neocities.org/

Hit random on neocities and came up with this:

https://empeethree.neocities.org/

I'd say that's pretty early 2000s

The BLINK tag

A sitemap is still good accessibility practice for e.g. screenreader navigation.

Also marquee tag

• use tables for layout, don’t hide the borders and don’t merge them
• also use iframes for root layout
• use the first 16 named css colors only
• only use default serif font in default size, don’t consider wide screens so body copy flows across the whole screen

Page colors that looked like Skittles vomit.

animated gifs.

soooo many animated gifs

They were everywhere:

Tiled backgrounds but not repeating pattern

Being linked to a URL with ~

👉CLICK HERE to E-MAIL👈

Email is the link, not the words click here and certainly not the entire thing.

A CGI web-counter.

Good luck though, I found one page talking about them, it had 11 dead links to web counter pages.

.wav background music starts playing and maybe you can turn it off. But maybe not.

Two paragraphs talking about how great you feel about finally getting on the World Wide Web. Include as many typos as possible.

A dozen links to other websites (make sure at most only 2 of them actually work).

Excessive use of the BLINK tag in titles.

Copy and paste some random Ascii art but make sure not to use the right font so nothing aligns properly.

Real Audio music files.

Don't forget to add a Blink to that marquee!

Remember shoutboxes?

Important that it resets when you click a link.

That tag hasn't been operable in a zillion years

I love that who gets added to the webring is exclusively in competence of the existing members, and it's just a question of convincing any one of the existing members to link to your site. It's a mathematical property of their structure and it must lead to some interesting power dynamics.

YESS frames

Oh no way, had to be shitty midi covers of Beatles songs.

Ha. And everyone has red eyes.