Geocities was a service people used to make web pages. It was one of the first places online where people got an Internet presence. People used it to make pages about themselves, their families, their pets, and their hobbies.
It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so there was this common idea of needing to have your domain, your site (both words being used traditionally to describe land and property), so you'd have presence. A more recent analog Myspace, where people could have a profile, show off what they liked, these kinds of things.
Fun fact: the entire Geocities archive was saved by a bunch of fans (I saw them at DWeb Camp this summer) and is below 500Gb - so it can fit on an SD card!
There's also a fan effort to recreate the experience of Geocities, called Neocities. It has a bunch of fan pages that will give you an idea of what Geoticies was like.
I was on their pre-ipo team back then I was nearly fired for bringing a linux laptop to work in 1998 linux was as bad to bring to work as say a bag of weed they assumed I was trying to hack my own employer pretty funny considering how dominant linux is today but back then everyone swore by Sun Solaris.
I remember some Geocities websites being horrendous in their appearance, making use of the "rainbow" animated horizontal ruler.
TBH I miss this era of the Internet when pages loaded fast even on slow computers (although Netscape was very fussy about its HTML). The past 20+ years of "progress" have just seen more and more JavaScript and unnecessary bloat loaded for pages, with very little content on them. Giant fonts, lots of fading-in of content, lots of scrolling required. It's pretty poor!
For many of us, Geocities was an introduction to having a personal website and building community through the internet. Personally, I wish the old geocities sites were still accessible. Believe it or not - since this was before search engines (really) and wikipedia (really) many geocities sites were treasure troves of links that led to a world of information.
A bit like wix a bit like dreamweaver/frontpage and a bit like myspace rolled into one, free hosting and an applet based WYSIWIG editor. Also a bunch of components like chat, guestbooks, webrings, etc. The also had a virtual community concept, with street addresses so you had neighbors and things like that. In retrospect that was a terrible idea, but maybe the analogy helped some less technical people.
there is a modern version of geocities, you can see what sites used to look like back in Web 1.0 https://neocities.org/browse
geocities was the most popular way of having your own personal website back in the day, people were making websites for fun and you can see it in the sites and pages they created, overflowing with personality and quirks.
It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so there was this common idea of needing to have your domain, your site (both words being used traditionally to describe land and property), so you'd have presence. A more recent analog Myspace, where people could have a profile, show off what they liked, these kinds of things.
Fun fact: the entire Geocities archive was saved by a bunch of fans (I saw them at DWeb Camp this summer) and is below 500Gb - so it can fit on an SD card!
There's also a fan effort to recreate the experience of Geocities, called Neocities. It has a bunch of fan pages that will give you an idea of what Geoticies was like.