Nothing says you can't sorta do both. You can have a simple but clean looking website that both makes people nostalgic for the old days yet is still easy to nav

Nothing says you can't sorta do both. You can have a simple but clean looking website that both makes people nostalgic for the old days yet is still easy to navigate in the modern era, and that website can be part of whatever webrings you want to be part of. Besides, what people count as modern or usable varies a lot depending on the niche, and if your content is good enough... well, you can get away with a lot of archaic design there. I mean, look at Serebii.net. Biggest Pokemon site in the world, probably the defacto source for information for many people in the community... and it's barely updated its layout in the last decade or two. Heck, in more niche subject areas you have literally every website sticking to fairly traditional web design principles. Retro gaming and computing sites (like those about 8-bit computers, video game mods or demoscene stuff) tend to look about as retro as their subject area, and very few people care about that. So, either mix them together since these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, or do whatever knowing that if your content is good enough, the aesthetics won't exactly matter a huge deal.