What was that first website about?

The first website was, fittingly, about the web itself: it explained what hypertext was and how to set up a server, since there was no existing audience to entertain — the priority was teaching researchers how to use this brand-new tool. CERN needed a way for scientists worldwide to share documents, and the site doubled as both demonstration and instruction manual.

A cat photo or online shopping would have required an established audience of casual browsers and payment systems that simply didn't exist in 1991; the web's first users were technical staff learning a new protocol, not window shoppers.

CERN preserved the original page and address as history, and you can still visit a restored version today, seeing how sparse the earliest corner of the web really was.