I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.
I think that was the core of the "old" 97 websites - I mean Google didn't exist back then, so finding a page when you search for a name was neither here nor there. Instead you found a webpage through word of mouth, and unlike today, you'd sit down and spend the time to have a good browse through the site.
On that last note, personal websites are often still manageable - that is, if you sit down for a couple hours, you can consume a lot of the content that one person created in the span of an X amount of years. Not so much with a lot of the bigger websites nowadays; Medium.com is a rabbithole and you'll quickly end up going to another author's posts. News and moreso social media sites are an infinite torrent of rapid fire blurbs, all tugging you one way then the other in terms of subjects, political sides, and in ways to try and sell something to you.
My own recollection of the pre-Google era of Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc was that search engines already accounted for the lion's share of content discovery online. My gut feeling would be that it might have been even larger back then than it is now, considering the role that social media play nowadays.
What it was like before then I can't say as I'm not that old, but I imagine that URLs would have been made known through the usenet, irc and so on, which were also more multicast/broadcast in nature than word-of-mouth in the sense of people who actually personally know each other in meatspace communicating point-to-point.
> I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.
It depends on what your expectations/goals are. I don't have any expectations to find regular readers or to have XXX monthly users. However, I have the expectation that people will find my blog post if they're looking for a problem which I have solved. I also have the expectation that I can link to my blog post in discussions, so I don't need to repeat myself.
I think that was the core of the "old" 97 websites - I mean Google didn't exist back then, so finding a page when you search for a name was neither here nor there. Instead you found a webpage through word of mouth, and unlike today, you'd sit down and spend the time to have a good browse through the site.
On that last note, personal websites are often still manageable - that is, if you sit down for a couple hours, you can consume a lot of the content that one person created in the span of an X amount of years. Not so much with a lot of the bigger websites nowadays; Medium.com is a rabbithole and you'll quickly end up going to another author's posts. News and moreso social media sites are an infinite torrent of rapid fire blurbs, all tugging you one way then the other in terms of subjects, political sides, and in ways to try and sell something to you.