I went to high school at the time (in Europe) and could create decent looking websites. I could have made a decent income from making web sites for businesses, but the idea of finding someone to host it on proper servers (with domain names) and actually sell and market it to customers were too foreign to me. Computers were expensive, so even if I found a place to host it for cheap, the machine was too much for my budget. You couldn't sell a website to a business and place it on Geocities...

Looking back at it now, the only truly difficult part (for me) was the infrastructure. I have heard stories about people just cold calling a merchant and sell a quick "home page" for $500 + hosting fees within minutes, and just generated a static page from a template with a logo, name and contact details. It was a gold rush where the right people with the right skills could make easy money.

Some of them were lucky enough to live in cities with local ISPs and hosted the sites on their personal PCs on a dial-up. People didn't expect much from the web at the time. I simply didn't have that kind of knowledge and risk taking ability at the time. My personal network did not contain any people who could have pointed me in the right direction either.

I'm kind of envious of today's youth, because they seem to have a better awareness of the business side of things and easily available technologies.

I feel you for the website deletion. Maybe you can find it on archive.org?