Author Archives: olia

Eclecticism vs. Modularity ⁋ by olia

background + design + last updated 2002 + starbg 2011-02-06

Clicking through the site of Valentine Michelle Smith of West Hollywood, I was puzzled by its schizophrenic appearance.

How can it be that the same person would put a Saturn devider

over starry night background

and then, on the next page, stack teddy bears over teddy bears?

The website is not just modular as most of its contemporaries, but eclectic. The latter is unusual for amateur webdesign.

The mystery has a very simple explanation: the author is a cross-dresser.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Village/9398/

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Approved by Military.com ⁋ by olia

awards + neighborhoods + pentagon 2011-02-06

Award buttons were a big thing in Geocities and outside. But it is difficult to find a neighborhood that was more serious about them than Pentagon. There is hardly a site without an award. For example, Military.com was generous in distinguishing soldiers of the electronic frontier with a medal.

Original URL: http://geocities.com/Pentagon/1083/

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Navigation on the Eve ⁋ by olia

last updated 2001 + navigation 2011-02-05

086’s offer to take the graphics he made for his site menu was nice, but inappropriate. True, amateur sites of the pre-template web were build with extensive use of found graphics. But the navigation bar was the element everybody tried to keep unique: so it was a constant experiment with form and pattern of the buttons. A typical result is on the image below.

This image also provides a typical example of navigation that is made in advance. The button “Hobies” exists before anything about the Hobbies was written. 15 years later this childhood disease of webdesign is not fully conquered.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/1098

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Redundancy ⁋ by olia

free collection + navigation 2011-02-03

I found a perfect illustration for my old thesis:

“Free collections are the soul of vernacular web. Lots of people were building their pages with free graphics and lots of people were making collections. The many-to-many principle really worked. Making your own site and building collections was a parallel process for a lot of people .“

When you click “Images” (5th button from the bottom in navigation on the left) you come to 086’s collection of images, The first link there brings us to “my own images” that are 086’s navigation elements again.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/086/image1.html

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