# Ancient Web: The Wererat's Lair Kept Its Mid-1990s Web Design on Purpose

The Wererat's Lair is a hand-coded rat, gaming, and personal site dating back to the 1990s, with pet-care material, galleries, MIDI, JavaScript tutorials, campaign journals, and a deliberately preserved mid-1990s visual style.

2026-08-20
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Switchboard Tech Services


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Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/).

The Wererat's Lair does not merely look like a mid-1990s website by accident.

It has been actively kept that way.

[Visit The Wererat's Lair](https://wererat.net/)

The site mixes pet-rat material, personal pages, role-playing games, photo galleries, old web tutorials, MIDI, and years of updates into one hand-built maze.

The navigation literally tells visitors to click on stones to enter the Lair.

That is the correct energy.

## Hand-coded in 1996 and still being maintained

A 2019 update includes the line: "why did I ever code this by hand back in 1996?"

That dates the site's basic architecture and explains a lot about what survives.

The update log stretches across pet rats and gerbils, D&D and Pathfinder campaigns, local web-design projects, family losses, galleries, and site maintenance. In 2020 the author noted that keeping the main Lair looking and sounding like the mid-1990s took actual effort. Old MIDI files and Java applets had stopped working, so parts were converted or replaced to keep the experience alive.

There is also a practical layer beneath the cave graphics.

The site maintained rat-care resources for decades. A 2024 update says the "Rat-help" section had finally ceased after nearly thirty years, while classic answers were left online. Elsewhere are rat-book recommendations, galleries, memorial pages, and older care information.

The web-design material is its own time capsule. One tutorial walks through a JavaScript photo album using arrays, form fields, and numbered image files—the kind of thing personal-site authors once copied, modified, and learned from directly.

The Wererat's Lair therefore preserves more than appearance.

It preserves a way of making websites: write the HTML yourself, bolt on a script when you need one, collect whatever subjects interest you, and let the whole thing become structurally weird over time.

Anyone can imitate 1996.

The Wererat's Lair was actually there.

[Return to The Wererat's Lair](https://wererat.net/)

Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/).

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Language: en-us

Content type: article

Author: Switchboard Tech Services

Published: 2026-08-20T22:13:15+00:00