The indiscriminate use frames, annoying animated gifs, embedded midi files and seizure inducing blink tags were all the rage whenGeoCities was the spot on the Internet some 10 years ago. Providing users with a free lot in one of their many virtual cities, GeoCities kick started the idea of owning your own website as being cool.

Sure, a vast majority of the designs elements in GeoCities webpages were gut-wrenchingly horrendous, (then again, a quick visit to MySpace shows that not much has changed) but bad design habits alone weren’t enough to deter Internet big wigs, Yahoo!, from shelling out $3.56 billion in stocks and $1 billion in options in 1999 a take over bid.

I have many fond memories of GeoCities, as I’m sure most of you do too. I set up my first “website” there during high school, and it’s a little sad to see them finally closing their gates for good even though GeoCities still pulls a reported 11.5 million unique visitors a year.

Oh well… Au revoir GeoCities and thanks for introducing me to HTML coding!

[source : lowyat.NET]

ps.: geocities was where the place where i learned HTML codes and built my very first website.