This week spelled the end of one of the web’s most infamous websites. An era of horrendous design was ended on Monday by their parent company Yahoo! The web might be a bit more of a better designed place these days but Geocities does remind us of funny times when the web design industry was very young.

So, what is happening to all of the various atrocities across the Geocities network? Well, Yahoo! have stated that they are trying to encourage people to sign up for the paid Yahoo! hosting as opposed to the free package that you are given automatically when you sign up. Yahoo! are working with the Internet Archive to try and make sure that as many Geo Cities sites are preserved as possible.

So why is this such a sad announcement? For me, Geocities gave a great opportunity to people who did not have the savvy or money to get web hosting and a working website. Although, the designs themselves were awful it still gave everyone a chance to voice their opinions on the net for free and they did! Goodbye Geocities!