Before the social feed: personal homepages and profile customization

Back when the web was ours to design

Credit: Alan W x Adryan Corcione

Before social feeds ruled the web, we shaped our online identities by customizing personal pages, often learning to code along the way.

My life trajectory changed once I learned how to copy and paste. The year was 2002, back when the internet felt like a place: a wooden computer workstation in my dad’s home office loft, complete with a Dell desktop and a pull-out shelf for a corded keyboard.

I was ten years old with a Neopets account. Once my dad told me how to copy and paste, I could customize my NeoPets shop page with a glistening pink bubble-text GIF that said something like “100% cute.”

Learning HTML on web 1.0

Around the same time, I soon discovered MatMice, a now-defunct (RIP) personal homepage builder made to teach kids the basics of coding. There, I launched a very serious Avril Lavigne fan page complete with a digital guest book, which I eventually migrated to Angelfire.¹ I built other homepages too, just for fun. I loved the blank canvas of a white web page, ready for whatever HTML an extremely online preteen could slap together.

I connected with other teenage girls who ran fan pages for their favorite pop stars: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, even fellow Avril Lavigne stans. We shared HTML tips on our websites, teaching each other through copied cover over AIM messages.

This peer-to-peer learning wasn’t unique to me. Fellow Substacker Caelyn Cobb of I’d Like to Report a Murder, had a similar experience on Lissa Explains It All, an HTML tutorial site made by a kid, for kids (and still online today). “Other girls would have tutorials on their sites for specific codes,” she told me. “So sharing and modifying code is sort of how I learned to do it!”

This era falls within Web 1.0, the first generation of the World Wide Web: the early internet, defined by static, “read-only” websites mostly created by a tech-savvy few and passively consumed by everyone else.

“I started out with a Geocities page about Petz,” Cobb adds. “Then I graduated to having a catch-all personal site with my blog, writing, photography, quizzes, guestbook, and links to other sites that moved around to Fortune City, Envy.nu, and private web hosts. Eventually, I got my own domain and the site became a little more art and writing focused and I had my blog on the front page as well.”

Profile customization and web 2.0

Coding followed me on other mid-‘00s platforms. When I signed up for MySpace, I spent Friday nights redesigning my profile layout (accompanied with a new profile song, of course). I was also active on Xanga, especially in emo high school roleplaying circles where I picked up CSS by copying and tweaking other users’ code.

Platforms like MySpace marked a shift into the second-gen Web 2.0, or “the participatory internet.” Think blog posts, YouTube uploads, tweets, Facebook walls—all content created and circulated by users themselves.

Profile customization became the bridge between these eras. Social platforms blurred the line between creator and user, encouraging self-expression within templates. We didn’t just consume content anymore. We shaped the spaces we occupied and often, our profiles reflected our own personalities.

“Profile customization made a statement on who you were,” explains Nicole Tremaglio of Nicstalgia who also coded her own Myspace and Xanga layouts. “It was an expression and extension of an existing identity rather than primarily a performance of one.”

To an introvert like me, profile customization was the most thrilling part of social media; while I still chatted with peers and online friends on Xanga and Myspace, the bulk of time I spent on the platforms centered around customizing my profiles.

Shifting away from our customizable corners of the web

However, in 2007, there was a shift when I signed up for Facebook. Amidst the thrill of a “new” social media my peers migrated to, I was disappointed I couldn’t customize my profile. Everyone’s profile layout looked the same! You could only change your profile photo and list your favorite books or movies. Tremaglio notes that Facebook had add-on features like Bumper Stickers and Picnik, which were quickly phased out.

Tremaglio had a similar experience when she signed up for Instagram in 2011. “I didn’t like being put in a box, or in this case, a square,” she adds.

Today, most social media platforms offer little to no customization. Instead, they rely on user-generated content from a wide pool of creators to fuel endlessly scrolling feeds tailored to individual interests. Why the transition? Tremaglio says it’s all about the money:

“Profile customization was not commodified, therefore it was deprioritized in favor of other products that could generate revenue from advertisers or consumers. The Internet dramatically shifted into a vehicle for commerce more so than connection. We don’t need profile customization anymore because the technical platform is no longer the central product—we are.”

Nostalgia of the early internet

Given the grim homogeneity of social feed profiles, there’s a revival of personal homepages on sites like NeoCities and Hot Glue. (Tremaglio created a web page for her podcast on Hot Glue.)

While I haven’t built a personal homepage on either platform, I do regularly maintain a portfolio website on Squarespace. I didn’t code it myself, but I also didn’t use a template. How could I use a template when customization is so close to my heart? When I initially created the site, I found tremendous joy in choosing my own color scheme. Even in its maintenance, customizing each page with the site’s visual editor gives me some sense of creative freedom amidst Web3.

Cobb still puts her early web design skills to use by updating the raw files on her portfolio site. “I was going to use Squarespace to save time,” she told me, “but it cost way more than just paying $30 a year for a domain and doing some basic coding. I found a simple, mobile-friendly template online, grabbed some code for a responsive menu, and tweaked it to fit my needs.”

Algorithm homogeneity of Web3

Homogeneity is a key component of the en-route third-generation Web3, largely (in my opinion) to the era of machine learning and generative AI. Scroll through TikTok or Instagram and it’s easy to get déjà vu: the same trending audio, the same Canva-style infographics, the same AI-generated art. In this climate, profile customization becomes a small act against homogeneity.

Among our social feeds that are still sprinkled with “original” user-generated content, the algorithm prioritizes same-ness—the very cultural homogeneity that feeds into generative AI LLMs (language learning models).

“Generative AI operates on patterns and trends present in the data it was trained on,” explains Wilmien Bos on Medium. “As a result, the content it produces often reflects the prevailing norms and aesthetics found in the training data. This means that AI-generated content may inadvertently contribute to the reinforcement of existing cultural homogeneity.”

In an era of AI slop, designing our corners of the internet helps us disrupt the algorithmic homogeneity. Whether it’s customizing your professional website or starting from scratch on NeoCities, profile customization sees beyond the social feed, something so intertwined with the rhythms of our offline lives—something even just a smidge radical in the techno feudal age.

Did you have a personal homepage? Did you customize your profile on Xanga, Myspace, or another early social platform? Did you learn to code as a kid? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

1. The guest book had anonymous haters—probably including one of my peers who bullied me on AIM—who claimed Avril “wasn’t punk” by the way.