The web was supposed to be a thing we make

It’s easy to forget in an era of billion-dollar Internet startups that the original vision of the web was that it’s something we make, not just something we consume. So Glitch is helping us to remember.

Retro never goes out of style on the World Wide Web. From its earliest days, people made personal webpages about their nostalgia for pop culture. When we launched a collection of First Websites on Glitch, it’d be easy to think we were just carrying on that great tradition. We painstakingly mimicked classic layouts from sites like LiveJournal, Neopets, Movable Type and many other old-school ways of publishing a web page. If you were on the Internet back then, or are just curious about web history, you should check it out, and remix those sites to make your own new classic.

But our inspiration went a little bit deeper: It was also about remembering that millions of people created their own websites in the era before today’s social networks took over. Learning to tweak HTML to create a GeoCities page, or to customize CSS to make a MySpace page look perfect, was a rite of passage for the first 10 0r 15 years of the web.

At Fog Creek, we’ve thought a lot about how to help more people create their own websites, apps, and software. We were inspired to create Glitch because we know there used to be a time when people on the web were almost as likely to make a web page as to read one. In a time when people online spend most of their time using just three apps, it seems more important than ever to encourage a diverse community of creators to experiment with their broadest set of ideas. And what better place to do so than a friendly, helpful community like Glitch?

So while it’s fun to click around old-fashioned (and, well, sometimes not very pretty) old websites, we also hope you’ll also take a few minutes to think about how you’d leave your mark on the web. But what if you’ve never made a web page? Don’t worry: You can check out this simple video we made of talking you through building your first web page on Glitch.

If you do take a few minutes to make a page, either for the first time or just for the first time in years, let us know by sharing it on social media. We can’t wait to see what you create!