If anything, web development is far more arcane and challenging now. No one just writes HTML, CSS or JS in a text editor anymore, the bare minimum expectation is to use complex frontend frameworks and NPM and compile everything from other languages. Compared to the sprawling, byzantine nightmare of modern web development, JQuery plugins were a breeze.
I think, it's simply the case that the web has matured, and more people are concerned with content than the superficiality of quirky presentation nowadays. Just as it's possible for an author to publish a book without knowing typesetting or running their own press, one can publish to the internet without knowing even the basics of HTML, CSS or JS.
And of course the web has coalesced around a set of standard layouts and visual language, as any media paradigm inevitably does, mostly because it has done so around a few standard frameworks. But then let's be honest, most Geocities sites kind of looked the same, too.
Back in 1995, a web page was an experimental medium, with very few experts in the field, and few businesses seeing it as a key asset. It could took long to develop, it could look fancy and whimsical, and there were few other sites to compare to, with the same properties. The chance for a web user to encounter something unusual was higher, because there was very little properly usual yet.
Today the web is the main medium, with a lot of standardization which comes from the need to be readable, accessible, look clean, and take as short to develop as possible. The consumer expects the same: simple, familiar packaging, easy access to the content which is usually a piece of text or a picture. This leaves especially little room for fancy on small-screen mobile devices. The web is not more of a place for artistic expression than newspapers were in 1970. Whimsical and fancy designs exist, but they are relatively rare and special-purpose, promo or art pages.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Look at https://play.date/ or https://tokio.rs/, functional yet interesting. Tokio.rs in particular has the best implementation of one of the worst patterns in the modern web: sticky content that changes when you scroll. It's a great visual aid in this case, but becomes annoying quickly when overused.
Teared up reading it.
So much love and work went into these homepages.
Considering that visual austerity is a distinct feature of Western visual design and seems foreign to Chinese/Indian/Middle-Eastern tradition—I sometimes wonder what Eastern people consider as examples of stupid tasteless Western design.
I recall a case years ago where I hosted a site for someone who appeared to be a paranoid schizophrenic. They called in one day complaining that we'd moved one of their HTML tables to the left by a few pixels. Another one was a website by somebody who was "exposing" their local municipality for doing things like charging for water and "illegally incarcerating" the website owner, who viewed their stints in a mental hospital as an attack to their freedom.
On the other hand, Lings Cars made it on this webring, and it's well deserved. That site is awesome and horrible at the same time, and it's designed to make us gawk at it for fun.
Some of the classic twentieth-century art by outsider artists like Adolf Wölfli was in large part the consequence of their illness, and yet it is appreciated nevertheless, so couldn’t the same persist today for the mentally ill’s analogous creations on the internet?
Edit: It becomes art when the person creating it declares it as art. Otherwise it's just sad. Thank you @mulmen for brining this point out.
In fairness, this is an attack on their freedom.
I don't have a better solution, but there has to be a better treatment for paranoid schizophrenia than kidnapping them, strapping them to a bed, transporting them in a windowless vehicle to a location they've never been, forcibly drugging them, and letting them wander around with other psychotics for a couple days.
The website design is pretty bad but based off of the OP saying "most of them are really deep and demonstrate some sort of twisted brain that was behind each site" I'm not really sure why this one is on the list.
One can perceive them as ugly, outdated, funny, or even pointless (I don’t, but it’s not the point). But using a domain like cursed.lol and a vocabulary like “twisted brain” or “fucked up shit” (OP’s comment) is a bit too much on the side of the mockery / disrespect / immaturity and doesn’t belong here IMO.
I miss the soul and work that went into sites of the 1990s where it was dense information with a point, not thousands of pixels filled with nothing.
High saturation text on a black background does not cancel out the overuse of high saturation colors. This looks like a flyer for Hempfest 2021.
(Why do pot smokers enjoy higher saturation than the rest of us? Has anyone studied this?)
But have hideous design :D
This one sounded somewhere between a hiccup and vomiting. Kind of a 'Hulp!'
How far the web strayed from this, it's a shame really. The soul has left :/
Here's what the widget looks like on your profile -- there are some wild markdown table hacks to make the buttons individually clickable: https://github.com/veggiedefender/
Unknown (math, science etc) 6
Asian 4
Christian 2
Middle America 2
Goth 1
Democrat 1
Irish 1
EU 1
Swiss 1
English 1
Or maybe you decided they were making fun of your demographic in particular, and confirmation bias led you to see only that? Are you seeing "culture war" where there isn't any, or am I still blind?