RIP Geocities

One of my early layouts for Broken-Echo.net

On October 26th, thousands of blinky GIFs flashed their last frame and scrolling MARQUEE tags came to a halting stop, as Yahoo closed down Geocities, its free website-building service.

I honed my web design chops on Geocities, almost 9 years ago, at age 14. It was my original HTML playground. I started doing web design after coming across an anime art site, and was inspired to create my own digital exhibition, spending weeks teaching myself how to construct a basic document and upload it to the web. Learning HTML was my first brush with the professional design world, and also with teaching myself a concrete skill outside of a school environment.

It’s interesting to look back at that era and what I was a part of. There was a definite group of young girls who got together and built incredible blogs, webrings, fan pages and cliques. Many owned their own domains and would often share their space with girls they barely knew. It was a mark of respect, to be handed a subdomain and 10MB of space. We changed our layouts the way we’d redecorate our lockers, constantly outdoing the previous design, constantly looking to improve.

We were the forerunners of blogs, LiveJournal, MySpace, the whole damn thing. We bought domains with pocket money, we doled out subdomains like they were candy, and we designed in colours of black, white, purple, red, and sometimes pink. We coded everything by hand, we tried all the latest in Javascript, and we bitched and ranted like nobody’s business. We were hosted between 1997(ish) and 2003(ish). We were aged between 13 and 21 (again, ish). We were girls – but there were boys too, if we let them in the clubhouse door.

We were mostly girls, we were all geeks, and we were very angsty!
-Naomi Eve

It was a demographic that had previously never really played a part in the web in this way before, and was definitely an important part of my teenage years. I met internet friends that I still keep in touch with today, collaborating, critiquing and putting our creative ideas together (and also gossiping about our lives, of course).

Here’s to you, Geocities.
Thanks for the memories.