My uncle told me to never trust a website without a visitor counter

Back in '98, I was building my first site on GeoCities for my high school band. My uncle, who worked IT, looked at it and said, 'If it doesn't have a counter, it's not a real site. People need to see it's active.' So I added one of those ugly, pixelated hit counters. It stayed at '000001' for six months. Turns out, nobody cared about the counter, they just wanted the MP3s of our terrible songs. Anyone else get bad web advice from a relative back then?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowanellis1mo ago

Remember when everyone insisted you needed a "best viewed in Netscape Navigator" badge too? Did your uncle ever give you any other advice that aged like milk, like telling you to never put personal info online or that Flash was the future?

hayden_ross821mo ago

Told me to buy a bunch of AOL trial CDs as an investment.