I don't think "stripped down" or "static" would be what would really describe the sites. Things were broken, varied, and sometimes simplified in handcrafted way

I don't think "stripped down" or "static" would be what would really describe the sites. Things were broken, varied, and sometimes simplified in handcrafted ways. I would say that old university pages for professors would be a good example of something basic which reflected the era, though there's been such a big churn in university URLs over the past decade (and presumably other times as well) that it's difficult to find an example which hasn't been mutated by university IT into something more 'presentable' or just hosted at a different URL. While most of what I could still locate dates only back to the mid-2000s , consider https://web.archive.org/web/20050122063815/http://matt.might.net:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050122063815/http://matt.might... , around that time blogspot was pretty active and well ranked for search engines at the time, freestanding wordpress instances were fairly popular after individuals moved past writing html posts manually and uploading them over ftp to a simple host, phpbb instances were available for most topics in the mid 2000s. The key thing is that once you move before the easy availability of php based webhosts, then you get into the territory of hand edited plain html (or microsoft frontpage) and very very little to no-javascript.