A website colophon is a short page, mainly visible in the footer section, that explains how a website was built. It follows a five-hundred-year-old printing term and repurposes it for the web, and it is one of the small trust signals that separate handmade websites from templated ones. You can’t find any colophon page on…
The 512KB Club is a public directory that mainly focuses on lightweight websites whose entire homepage, images and all, loads under 512 kilobytes of page weight, without doing any compression. It’s a small corner of the small web pushing back against web bloat, where a single news homepage can weigh several megabytes without reading a…
Some of the websites turn scrolling into something closer to reading a comic book or watching a slow reveal. That’s the exact thing behind scrollytelling examples, where pages move with your mouse wheel or swiping your trackpad actually changes what happens on screens, instead of just moving the text-related content. In this blog, I give…
Piczo websites were free, drag-and-drop personal websites that let teenager in the early 2000s build their own web space without knowing a single line of code. Piczo mattered because it gave teenagers a place to build their own websites before Facebook dominated the online world. If you search for what happened to Piczo websites, the…
A pen pal website is an online platform where you can build a profile, share your interests, and get matched with the same intrested people around the world for regular letter writing or messaging. People search for these pen pal sites because they need something that social media can’t give at that time: a slower,…
Net art is a specific branch of internet art made to exist inside the browser, using the hyperlink and the raw structure of a webpage as the medium rather than just showing a photo or a painting. Some writers use the word web art interchangeably, usually referring to the original 1990s movement specifically. People search…
Browser toys are small, no-install web experiments built purely to be poked at. It’s not finished. Unlike other games, there is no score, no ending, and no menu. You open a tab, and something will come and respond to your mouse. People search for them because sometimes you want 5 minutes of distraction without downloading…
The history of web culture stretches back to the dial-up bulletin boards of the 1990s, and it includes access to personal homepages, webrings, blogs, and finally algorithm-driven platforms we use today. This matters because the internet was not always a handful of apps competing for attention. It had millions of small, handmade corners of the…
A dollmaker website where you can build a small character by dragging pieces of clothing, hair, and accessories onto a base body usually saves it as a single image in the end. In the late 1990s, this format became popular when early dollz appeared as pixel art rather than smooth vector graphics. People still make…
Userbars were small rectangular graphics that forum members added to their websites to show a fandom, hobby, interest, or part of their identity. This usually came in 350×19 pixels, combined with a small image and short, bold, pixel-style text inside a thin border. People collected them, traded them, and displayed them beneath their posts. A…
If you’re looking for interesting websites to explore, these 25 websites are worth exploring and offer something different from the other side of the internet. This includes interactive websites, digital art, browser experiments, visualizations, internet archives in the indie web, and something unusual projects that give you a reason to click, create, explore, or wonder…
An oekaki board is a forum that allows visitors to draw directly inside their browser and post the sketch straight to the gallery even without downloading any software. The word oekaki comes from a Japanese term oekaki, which means simply drawing or doodling. These were casual sketch spaces, not polished portfolio sites. Before the era…
Webzines are self-published online magazines built and edited like magazines rather than traditional-style blogs, and interestingly, they existed years before blogging became the internet’s default way to publish. Inspired by photocopied print zines, they brought the same DIY spirit to the early internet, using the World Wide Web (WWW) to publish collections of art, writings,…
The Handmade Web describes websites built by one person by hand, without using a template or modern AI systems. It names both a design philosophy and a real moment in the earliest internet history: the mid-to-late 1990s, when the early internet was small enough that a single personal website felt like its own little corner…
