Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Village/1408/
Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Petsburgh/3609/
Oirginal URL: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/8762/cphp/
Original URL: http://de.geocities.com/ernstwolframschmidt/
Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Gulf/1857/
This is a small collection of Geocities pages that “closed”, i.e. their authors announced their end, deleted everything and presented a link to a new URL outside of Geocities or to a soon, fresh and redesigned return. None of these “new” incarnations of the above examples does exists today, only the ruins survived, a state very common on Geocities sites.
The conclusion should be that “closing” sites is a questionable practice. Deleting all contents in the hope to draw temporary attention to something else puts the fruit of hard labor at risk of never being seen again.
Also, the lack of frequent updates is no reason to delete anything. Ten years later, nobody cares how often a web site was updated, only is if it is in any way interesting. The web is often seen as a medium of “now”, where data is instable, unreliable and volatile. But that is more of a lazy attitude than a given fact. So, webmasters, take the future into account!
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