Web Design Museum: This web gallery geared toward “forgotten trends in web design” is loaded with screenshots from websites dating as far back as 1991. [1] X Research source Neocities: This free webhosting site is home to tons of 90s-style websites (and some modern ones) thanks to the service’s similarity to 90s website megahost Geocities. You’ll find tons of active retro websites with all of the best (worst?) features of the 90s, including plenty of colorful Comic Sans text and low-resolution animated GIFs. The Geocities-izer: Speaking of Geocities, this fun tool will display any website as it would have looked if it were on Geocities in the 90s. Try it out with wikiHow. com—just turn down your speakers first! Cameron’s World: This site takes the wildest 90s website traits and combines them into a single webpage. Wayback Machine: If you want to see old 90s websites that no longer exist or just see old versions of current websites, you’ll love Archive. org’s Wayback Machine.
While WordPress is the modern go-to option for free blogs, it won’t be easy to make a WordPress blog look like the 90s unless you use a 90s-inspired WordPress theme. Most modern website builders focus on responsive design, which didn’t exist in the 90s. If you want to create an authentic 90s-looking blog, you’ll need a customizable host that lets you edit HTML directly like Blogger or Tumblr—both have tons of 90s-inspired themes to play around with. If you’re looking for host with the 90s spirit and you’re willing to write (or copy and paste) HTML code from scratch, Neocities has a free tier that boasts enough features to cover all of your 90s website needs. And if you’re new to HTML or a little rusty, you can design your layout in a generator like Sadgrl’s Layout Builder and paste the code into your own site! If your host supports Bootstrap, try the Geo for Bootstrap website template, which is loaded with Comic Sans fonts, rainbow colors, beveled buttons, fake progress bars, and more.
Now that standard for customizing your fonts on the web, a lot of the old HTML tags that stylized fonts in the 90s no longer work (including the famous
Search the web for “web-safe color palette” to find the hex codes and color names, or just check out this site: https://www. rapidtables. com/web/color/Web_Safe. html. You can use these color hex codes for fonts, tables, and more.
Search the web for “free repeating background” and see what comes up. You can also check out Background Tiles or Pixabay’s repeating gallery for backgrounds that tile seamlessly. Check out Textures Town for 3D animated background textures in the GIF format. If you don’t want to go overboard with a busy background, you can still get the aesthetic with a solid black background. Just make sure you use lots of brightly-colored text and images.
Cool Text’s graphics and logo generator lets you crate free text logos from an assortment of true-to-the-90s styles. Flaming Text has more great free 90s logo creation templates, plus a few modern ones. Make Wordart lets you design 90s-style Microsoft Word WordArt logos right in your browser.
One of the best places to find authentic 90s GIFs is the Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine. Try searching for “button” to find all sorts of directional buttons (like “Next” and “Back”), or “cat” to find all sorts of silly cat-related GIFs. Check out 99GIF Shop for lots of free GIFs straight out of Web 1. 0! You can create your own pixel art animations with a free online editor like Piskel. Check out Glitter Graphics for all things glitter, including animated glittering backgrounds, dividers, icons, banners, and buttons for your website. Visit the 88x31 GIF Collection to find hundreds of buttons that are 88x31px—the most common size for website buttons in the 90s. You can find a massive amount of free badges for all sorts of tools and topics at Web Badges World or, make your own blinking buttons at Blinkies Café.
HTML tables of the 90s often had thick beveled borders, often with too much (or too little) padding between the text and objects on the page and those borders. If you’d rather not mess around with tables, you can get the same effects applying CSS properties to Div tags—especially the border-style: inset property.
90s Cursor Effects has 9 simple cursor effects, including rainbows and snowflakes. RV’s Free JavaScript/DHTML Effects has tons of free mouse, text, and graphics effects that are easy to add to any website. Web Neko features animated Neko the Cat mouse cursors that chase the mouse as it moves.
