Really depends, as what you are describing spanned likely a nearly 25 year span (give or take a few.) but for me, the heyday, was the mid90s to early 2000s. it

Really depends, as what you are describing spanned likely a nearly 25 year span (give or take a few.) but for me, the heyday, was the mid90s to early 2000s. it was a magical place full of "Under Construction" webpages (static hand coded HTML webpages), and user run linking networks called "Web Rings." Web rings, basically if someone linked to you, you linked back to them, and to someone else, typically there would also be a link to an index of all in the ring, a random button, and generally some sort of image related to the ring, they generally followed some sort of theme, star trek fans, college alumni, mudds/fantasy games, etc... The browser wars where still a thing, and the look and feel of the internet wasn't settled, browsers where implementing there own features, that were wildly divergent from each other, and sometimes the same functionality, that required completely different code to perform it. Java Applets, where the bees knees, and mostly pointless, but pretty features to the web (water ripple effects on images...) Gif or any animated image format was still a heavily contested copyright issue. And droves of people from all over the world were pouring "online." Highschool and colleges, trying to come up with a way to "cite" webpages like book authors. (url, author, publish date.) The organization of the net, was very much akin to the wild west, small clusters of interlinked sites serving as frontier towns, universities played a huge role, as they often had the students who had the brains, time, and inclination, to create sites, and generally small of enough to maintain a "sitemap" of all of their pages. No real way to search all of the net, no "social networks", chatrooms and IRC were hot beds of communications, and because of the loose coupling, it was much easier to meet people, and actually become friends with them. I'd say it wasn't until pop-ups started showing up everywhere and people started buying goods online, did the web shift its direction. And though I tech is amazing today, I still feel we aren't the better for it.