The technology limitations is really what is missing. Most personal pages had zero CSS and CSS itself was extremely primitive. JS was even more rare and minimal. Most pages used font tags and table layout, this was far before semantic web. Most people stuck to the “web safe” 256 colors which is why the color schemes were so distinctive, and even then, most sites used the “named” browser colors like “red” or “green” rather than hex colors. Horizontal rules dominated the land unless you were in-the-know about invisible pixel gifs for layout, always abusing tables. Most importantly it you didn’t target internet explorer 6 at the most (and stuck a little banner “best viewed on X” then it wasn’t a very deep site anyways!

Bonus points for side navigation bars that were an iframe so you didn’t have to copy paste the same sidebar code across your multiple pages.