The old days... wow... well I guess like Koroku said, there was fewer newbies. And more serious gamers talking about gaming and stuff. Now there seems to be a whole lot of kids who like the cartoons and toys and stuff. I guess Pokemon in general has reverted backwards instead of maturing.
As for websites, I recall
PokeMasters being the biggest thing ever. Before PPN and Serebii there was PokeMasters. It was just so damn huge. I remember the old days. Being active on PokeMasters and Serebii forums. Lots of game talk, and playing around. There was an insane amount of fan sites, and only a few that actually made it anywhere. I recall a site called Unown Dungeon being one of the big hitters in the second wave.
Then Hitler sent a brigade to Düsseldorf and company A had to defend their base while snipers set up to... Oh, sorry, wrong memories. =P
Yeah, back in the old days a lot of kids got inspired by the popular sites and set off to become webmasters themselves. So there were a whole lot of n00b sites out there. Poorly developed and maintained and most just ended up left for dead, never to be surfed again. Like mine which I had back in 2001. I knew nothing of sites and I basically didn't do anything for almost a year, and then finally closed it. And now i just discovered that it's still up XD
https://www.pokeplanet.0catch.com/
Since then I have grow a lot. And now I'm a top notch webdesigner, focusing on standards and design, as well as HCI. I get hired by companies and all sorts of things. Though I haven't had time to do any personal sites for about 2 years I have kept busy in the freelance industry, and learned a lot. Today there doesn't seem to be many people who have advanced far who also want to keep a Pokemon site. It's just to juvenile for advanced webdesigners, and to be honest, Pokemon just doesn't have that much unique stuff to offer any more. The most important thing now is about stats and data about the games and there are already plenty of sites out there that cover that. I am sort of a pessimist, so I will say this as my own opinion and you can take it as you wish: Pokemon is dead.
The games were great and all but if you've been playing for as long as I did before I left, you kind of realize it's time to grow over to more advanced stuff as far as websites, and maybe into more mature things as far as entertainment.
PC was the last big thing to happen to the Pokemon website community, and it has died down a lot since before. I remember there used to be so freakin' many users online at the same time before, 24/7. When it was just launched I was there from the beginning. PPN Steve told me about it over chat when he launched it and I just had to join :P. Bout 2 years later, I was completely out of the Pokemon circuit, but I heard from Steve and ended up designing a layout for PPN. I'm sure if you visited PPN back at that period, you must've seen it. I didn't have time to visit the site that much back then so I don't know what the feedback was on it, but Steve kept it on for quite a while, so I was pretty proud to finally have contributed to the Pokemon Website Community in some way :P.
Well, that's my story. I have far more memories than can fit in a post, but I can sum it up by saying that it was fun.