Frontpage, I'm going to bet. :)
I was an early user of Frontpage, shortly after Vermeer released it. A few months later, it was bought by Microsoft. Looks like Frontpage was absorbed and discontinued (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage).
It was handy but I was just messing around with a very simple personal website and most of the time I'd just use Notepad or something like that.
>About the same time Java on webpages was a thing.
Guilty... I wrote a simple java applet to draw a polar plot of antenna radiation patterns. Later I added a calculator applet - after all, how handy would a simple calculator only a website away be?? I should have gone with the trends and converted both to javascript... but I did not.
>Then there was a fad that sites had to have some kind of animated intro on the front page
I remember the omni-present "site under construction" animated gif. As in, > 50% of websites had them somewhere.
Follow the link in this article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...) for an eye-bleeding collection. Haha!