GeoCities, Angelfire, and the Lost Art of Building Ugly First
In the late 1990s, the Internet felt like a frontier town. Every street corner was a neighborhood of neon backgrounds, flashing GIFs, auto-playing MIDI files, and visitor counters proudly ticking upward. It was messy, loud, and often eye-searing, but it was alive.
Platforms like GeoCities and Angelfire gave ordinary people the tools to carve out their own slice of cyberspace. No gatekeepers, no product managers, no design systems. Just raw HTML, questionable fonts, and an open invitation to experiment.
This “ugly web” was the origin story of online creativity. You didn’t need permission to publish. You didn’t need perfect branding. You needed a text editor, an image folder, and the courage to hit “upload.”
The Aesthetic of Imperfection
GeoCities organized its users into “neighborhoods” like Silicon Valley or Hollywood, where thousands of personal pages bloomed. Angelfire offered the same DIY freedom, later competing with Tripod. The results were chaotic: tiled star backgrounds, rainbow Comic Sans, blinking marquees. But that chaos was part of the charm.
Today, designers wince at the idea of “ugly first.” Yet those sites embodied the hacker spirit: build fast, learn in public, iterate later. They were proof that the barrier to entry was not polish but participation.
Shipping Ugly, Learning Fast
For entrepreneurs and product builders, the early web is a masterclass in iteration. Most of those GeoCities pages broke every design rule we now take for granted. Still, they taught their creators the fundamentals of hyperlinks, layout, and hosting. Each “under construction” GIF was not a failure; it was a milestone in learning.
“The barrier to entry was not polish but participation.”
Compare this to today’s startup culture, where founders agonize over landing page colors or perfect pitch decks before launching. The early web reminds us that polish is not a prerequisite for value. The willingness to “ship ugly” often beats waiting for perfection.
Timeline: The Rise and Fall of Ugly-First Platforms
- GeoCities (1994): Founded as Beverly Hills Internet, later rebranded GeoCities, it allowed users to build websites within themed “neighborhoods.” Acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, shut down in 2009.
- Tripod (1995): A competitor targeting college students. It combined hosting with a proto-blogging platform.
- Angelfire (1996): Began as a medical information site, but pivoted to free web hosting. Known for its quirky community and wild aesthetic.
- Myspace (2003): Took the DIY spirit mainstream. Customizable profiles brought back the chaos of personal expression, often crashing browsers in the process.
- Tumblr (2007): Simplified creation with templates and reblogs, but preserved some of the anarchic, personal energy of earlier sites.
- Neocities (2013): A deliberate homage to GeoCities, reviving the idea of “make your own site, your way.” Still active today.
Echoes in the Modern Web
The spirit of GeoCities isn’t entirely gone. Indie makers on sites like Product Hunt or weekend hackathons channel that same energy: launch fast, let the world see it, improve in the open. Even the resurgence of “brutalist web design” is, in some ways, a nostalgic nod to the jagged freedom of Angelfire.
The Lost Art We Need Back
When the Internet became professionalized, we lost some of that scrappy willingness to just publish and see what happens. Today’s creators often feel paralyzed by comparison—if your first release doesn’t look like Apple’s homepage, why bother? But the original web pioneers didn’t wait. They built ugly, they shared anyway, and the collective mess gave us the foundation of web culture.
For founders, designers, and creators, it is clear, “ugly is not the enemy.” Inaction is. GeoCities and Angelfire remind us that the only way to learn is to publish, even if the result looks like it belongs in 1997.