Geocities was long enough ago that some Internet noobs may not even be familiar with it. Geocities was an early attempt at offering personal homepages for the masses. It wasn't successful and most of the Geocities websites were known for their immature look. Geocities pages tended to have a large number of animated gifs.
A website called Geocities-izer will make your site look like a Geocities page. You can see what it does to the New York Times homepage here. Services like Facebook and Tumblr allow web users to have an online presence without their pages looking amateurish.
