That clunky but lovable monument to beginning-level Web design, Geocities, is going by the wayside. That’s a name that hasn’t been heard often in the last several years, but anyone who was doing anything on the Web in its early years knows about this service and has probably created something on it. Back before the much slicker interfaces and tools of MySpace and Facebook were available, this was how the average do-it-yourselfer created a Web presence. Its passing is evidence that the Web has undergone radical change since the ’90s. Do-it-yourselfers these days are posting on self-hosted Wordpress blogs, or perhaps Blogger or LiveJournal or even a powerful CMS like Drupal or Joomla. Others are making do with profiles on social networking sites. People who do Web work professionally now specialize in a small number of aspects of the rapidly growing field, and it takes more and more people to create a site sophisticated enough to compete. The era of the very basic, static HTML site is over.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/26/geocities.closing/index.html
