Bring Back the Webmaster: How Personal Websites Can Revive the Spirit of the WWW

The internet today feels like a far cry from what it once was. Once a place for personal expression, exploration, and discovery, the World Wide Web has slowly been overtaken by a monolithic, corporate landscape. It’s hard to find connection in an online world dominated by social media algorithms and the relentless pursuit of clicks, likes, and data. Gone are the quirky, handcrafted websites that reflected the unique voices of their creators. Now, we navigate uniform grids of content fed to us by machines, not by people.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

If you know how to build a website—or want to learn—I encourage you to reclaim your space on the web. Build something that’s truly yours. Bring back the fun, the creativity, and the personality that made the early internet such a joy to explore. It’s time to resurrect the role of the “Webmaster.”

In the early 2000s, being a Webmaster meant crafting a site that represented you, not because you were chasing likes or SEO rankings, but because you had something to say or share. You built it, coded it, and shaped it to reflect your ideas. More than that, you linked out to other creators, helping people discover new corners of the internet through mutual appreciation. This was the essence of the World Wide Web: interconnection, not just of data but of people.

Where did that go?

We traded personal for professional, handmade for algorithm-driven. In the process, we lost that sense of exploration and wonder—the ability to stumble upon someone’s personal page and get a peek into their world. Today’s web can feel like an assembly line, where everything looks the same and feels transactional. We need to bring back the spirit of the Webmaster.

Here’s how: If you have the skills or want to develop them, build your own site. Make it fun. Make it personal. Create something that’s uniquely you, and don’t worry about whether it’s polished or perfect. You don’t need to be a professional designer or a coder—there are tools now that make it easier than ever to start something. What matters is that your site feels like it came from a real person, not a template or a content farm.

Once you’ve built it, share it. Find like-minded creators and cross-link with them, just like we used to. This is the heart of what made the early internet feel alive—people linking out to other people. If you saw a cool site, you linked to it. You shared the experience. You created a web of connections that was organic, human, and full of discovery.

The beauty of personal websites is that they can be anything you want them to be. They can be blogs, photo galleries, portfolios, or just spaces to share your thoughts and passions. There are no rules except the ones you make. The important thing is that you’re putting a piece of yourself out there, free from the constraints of algorithms or the pressure of “likes.” It’s your corner of the web, and it’s yours to shape.

The world of social media and corporate-driven content has its place, but it shouldn’t be the only place. The internet was meant to be a vast network of diverse voices, not a one-size-fits-all feed. By building our own spaces and linking with others, we can restore a bit of what’s been lost and create something better: a web that feels more personal, more connected, and more human.

So let’s bring back the Webmaster. Let’s make the web weird again, fun again, and most importantly, ours again.