everyone gets a homepage
This was the era when "having a website" stopped being something only universities and companies did. GeoCities, launched in 1994, organised free personal homepages into themed "neighborhoods" — Area51 for sci-fi, Heartland for family stuff, SunsetStrip for music — and by 1997 it was one of the most-visited sites on the web. Anyone could learn a little HTML and put up a page about their cat, their band, or their conspiracy theory of choice.
The look of the era is burned into anyone who was there: tiled background images, rainbow horizontal rules, animated "under construction" GIFs on pages that would never actually be finished, guestbooks to sign, and a visitor counter proudly displaying a suspiciously specific number. Web rings linked hobbyist sites together in a loop long before anyone called it a "network effect".
Yahoo! (1994) organised the growing web into a browsable directory, back when a human editor deciding which category your site belonged in was a reasonable way to search the internet. It's easy to laugh at now, but for a few years it was genuinely the best tool available — Google didn't exist until 1998, and even then it took a while to change people's habits.