[II2II]

To my knowledge, they typical ISP of the 1990s provided free web hosting. (At least it was in my neck of the woods.) It may not have been much, but it was enough to put up a personal website that was not plastered with advertising.

The necessity to write your own HTML (or use tools like Dreamweaver and Frontpage) and the anything goes design mentality may have resulted in some atrocious sites, but it also made the web feel more personal. While there may be some ability to tweak the design while using a CMS, it is much more constrained and sites feel much less personal.

[bcrosby95]

Yep. I took a high school computer science class back in 1995. My end of year project was a website about my MUDing adventures and I put it up on the free web hosting from our ISP. I wish I still had it. I remember thinking it was pretty terrible even back then.