Last week my friend Preeti Chhibber made a goofy, fun, retro Geocities-style website using neocities.org to promote her book and inspired a bunch of other writers — including me — to play along. I dug up my old backup drives, found the original graphics and code I used for my members.aol.com website back in 1999, and built gregpak.nexus using good ol’ HTML 2.0. And it is a thing of beauty. Just… look at it!

It gets even better — click and scroll for all kinds of goodies — including a functioning web ring! In 2025! I know, astounding!

So this is all just for fun. But it feels right because something about it IS right. As Preeti wrote in her blog, “Right now, it feels like we’re in a world with tech trying to take over the things we create as human beings, so maybe I am chasing the alternative we used to have. We made things and tech was there to serve whatever purpose we needed to.”

When I handcode a hinky little site using HTML, I’m actually making something. Something unique, with my messy little fingerprints and decisions and quirks all over it. And the code all makes sense; it might get complicated and I might screw it up, but I can figure it out and type it up and it gives me clear results that I can then tweak and improve to my liking. That’s enormous — not just a sense of control, but actual control in a world in which so much control over the most basic things in our lives has been taken away. On a human, ethical, and emotional level, it’s just… good.

But what kind of shocked me was realizing that on a practical design level, my goofy little gregpak.nexus site was actually better in many ways than my fancy, “professional” WordPress gregpak.com site.

First, it’s just fun to look at. And fun means a ton on the internet — it gets people to look and click, which is what all these business websites are supposed to do. That by itself is solid gold.

Second, gregpak.nexus loads in a split second — because we optimized everything for dialup back in the day and a hinky HTML site isn’t loaded down with cookies and trackers and all kinds of other bloat from third party add-ons. It’s an actual relief visiting these neocities.org sites after slogging through slow modern websites.

Third, gregpak.nexus looks great on a desktop or mobile. It’s just one long column so there’s none of that kludgy reformatting that makes sites that look great on a desktop look boring on mobile.

Fourth, it’s just cleaner and better. Yes, a lot of neocities sites aim to actually be much LESS clean with a bunch of animated gifs and sparkly backgrounds, and that’s awesome, too. But back in the day, I was aiming for as straightforward a navigation experience as possible. I’ve tried to find WordPress themes that keep things simple, and I think my 2024 site below looks pretty darn good — particularly after I went into the CSS and reduced the size of the headlines and cut back on some excessive white space. But after staring at gregpak.nexus for a few days, gregpak.com felt way too busy, somehow.

So I stole some time and picked a new WordPress theme (actually a very old theme, Twenty Eleven), and revamped the site. And here’s what it looks like now:

The whole thing’s cleaner and clearer. I don’t use most of the social media sites associated with icons on the 2024 homepage — so I got rid of four of them. And I reduced the size of my Pak Man Productions log and added a Greg Pak Shop square, because sending people to my shop should be one of the primary functions of the site. I also got rid of the third column on the right (the “Latest Posts” widget still exists — it’s now just a bit further down in the left hand column). That gives more room for the main content to be easily and quickly read without distraction. And there’s even a little space on the left for a little retro fun with my “Open Directory Cool Site” award graphic (I was so proud of getting that distinction back in 1999) and a classic dog gif that’s a link to my gregpak.nexus site.

Important on a subtle level is that there’s less wasted white space and fewer unnecessary graphics like that black bar at the top of the right hand column on the original site. These aren’t things you might think a lot about when visiting a site, but they’re subliminal distractions. As it is now, there are fewer things to look at and click on, but the things you see are all important and the clicks go to good places.

Some technical notes for the true WordPress nerds reading this: To get the Twenty Eleven theme working they way I wanted, I added CSS to drastically reduce the size of the post headlines and I reduced the amount of padding in multiple places. I also tweaked the category php file to change the way the names of categories appear on their indexes to match the way the names of regular pages appear, making the font bigger and bolder and removing the “category archive” text. I use category indexes like mini-websites for each of my different projects, and the tiny headers of the original design don’t make sense for that function. It’s all much clearer now.

I also figured out that when you’re uploading a banner image (which the theme recommends should be 1000 x 288 pixels), the system first checks to see how tall it is, so if you’ve uploaded an image shorter than 288 pixels, it won’t let you crop it at its full width. Sounds a bit confusing, but the upshot is that if you want to have a banner SHORTER than 288 pixels, you need to upload an image as tall or taller than 288 pixels. Then the system will make the whole thing available for use and you can make it shorter using the crop tool.

I’m not entirely done — the revamped site doesn’t look as great as it could on mobile because the search window moves up to cover part of the header. And the Twenty Eleven theme apparently doesn’t play well with the Yoast plugin, which is what enabled me to have a custom image load when I shared a link to my homepage on social. (When Yoast is enabled on Twenty Eleven, the website’s name and description show up twice in the “title” descriptor of the website, which is messy and could cause SEO problems.) I could probably figure those things out by digging into the code of the WordPress theme, but I’ve got other things to take care of, so I’m gonna let ’em slide for now.

All in all, massive success, in my opinion! Thank you, Preeti! And thank you 1999 me for providing me with the graphics and code and inspiration to rediscover the bits of old school design that helped me improve my site 26 years later.