I went down a weird rabbit hole. On that second link I noticed an entertaining little logo for the "HTML Writers Guild" at hwg.org, which seems to have began in 1994 as a "guild" of people who write HTML, helping each-other make better webpages.
Going by Internet Archive snapshots, it seems that over time, HWG grew into providing various services including some sort of training and certification. You can see how the front page changes over time, and their services expanded and updated over time, but the core idea remained the same all the way through December of 2023.
It was apparently an amusing enough concept to be made fun of on Something Awful in 2011.[1]
But then, between December 4th 2023 and December 6th 2023, the page was replaced with a Wordpress instance, first hosting just some filler content, but in just a few days, it was molded into yet another crypto blogspam publisher. Lest you think I am being too harsh, the navbar at the top doesn't even spell "crypto" correctly as of this writing; it is truly a low effort operation. The "About us" still references the original guild, but everything else has been wiped clean.
So what happened to the guild members? Well, apparently, at some point rather early on, the HWG "merged" with the "IWA", the International Web Association, and while information about what exactly is going on with that organization, it does still seem to exist in some form[2].
It kind of gets weirder though, as if you crawl around you can find that some original HWG pages are indeed, still online at their original location, some of them last updated as far back as 2001.[3] Wow! This hints to me that the domain was not obviously hijacked or purchased, though it's unclear what the deal is.
Going by Internet Archive snapshots, it seems that over time, HWG grew into providing various services including some sort of training and certification. You can see how the front page changes over time, and their services expanded and updated over time, but the core idea remained the same all the way through December of 2023.
It was apparently an amusing enough concept to be made fun of on Something Awful in 2011.[1]
But then, between December 4th 2023 and December 6th 2023, the page was replaced with a Wordpress instance, first hosting just some filler content, but in just a few days, it was molded into yet another crypto blogspam publisher. Lest you think I am being too harsh, the navbar at the top doesn't even spell "crypto" correctly as of this writing; it is truly a low effort operation. The "About us" still references the original guild, but everything else has been wiped clean.
So what happened to the guild members? Well, apparently, at some point rather early on, the HWG "merged" with the "IWA", the International Web Association, and while information about what exactly is going on with that organization, it does still seem to exist in some form[2].
It kind of gets weirder though, as if you crawl around you can find that some original HWG pages are indeed, still online at their original location, some of them last updated as far back as 2001.[3] Wow! This hints to me that the domain was not obviously hijacked or purchased, though it's unclear what the deal is.
[1]: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/html-guild-writers/
[2]: https://iwanet.org/
[3]: https://hwg.org/member/