Explore the Small Web!*
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AnyBrowser Friendly (15)
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Web 1.0 Friendly (8)
Categories
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Cool People (5)
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News (1)
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Search Engines (4)
* PARENTAL DISCLAIMER
Here at The Retro Millennial I will always strive to be family
friendly. While the links in these directories are generally clean and
safe, the same cannot be said for the whole of the small web/indie web. A
lot of it is just cool people being creative, but just like the old web of the
90s, and the internet of today, it's not necessarily a safe place for
kids. Please use discretion.
How I built this directory
I developed this directory using Microsoft FrontPage 2000. While I hand coded the rest of this web site using a combination of vintage and modern tools, I wanted to see what building a page in an old WYSIWYG program was like. Back at the turn of the millennium, this would have been how many non-tech savvy people would have done it... so this is for them :)
This early build of the directory is inspired by the early versions of sites like Yahoo! circa 1994.
Image courtesy of the Web Design Museum.
What is a web directory?
Well, you see, back in the early days of the web we didn't know too much about the internet. Search engines were just starting out and, quite frankly, they weren't very good. We discovered new websites by things like webrings, magazines, newspapers, word of mouth, or even just exploring out of curiosity. However, there were some people and companies that would gather up cool, weird, interesting, and useful website in order to compile them into categorical lists like this. These lists were known as web directories. Early search engines like Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, and more started out as directories before adding their search features.
My goal with this one is to pull together some of the best of the old web, the small web, the indie web, and more along with some good resources for our retro tech hobby. I've done my best to put them together into categories to help us explore the wonders of the small web just like we explored the old web back in the 90s and 2000s.
Last updated: July 30, 2026
