Web Sites Before and After

Jul 17, 2007 by Matt | Posted in Design 3 Comments

What have websites looked like over the years? With the help of the WayBack Machine, we’ll take a look.

Below are eight sites. Each has a prior design on the left and the current on the right. Nice ‘n easy to compare.

Yahoo

Despite the fact that I’m not a very big fan of Yahoo (Google is king), we’ll start with them.

The first screenshot is from April 9, 2006. Compare it to today’s screengrab. They’ve improved their design a bit, haven’t they? All in all, it’s a bit less cluttered and a little more dynamic. Also note the more prominent ad….

Ars Technica

Ars Techica is a cool technology news site with an even cooler design.

Shown is the prior version of Ars compared with the current. The new one is totally cool. You can’t get the full effect in this tiny image. Check out Ars Technica.

The Blog Herald

This blogging news site hasn’t changed much lately. The most noticable change is the header.

North X East

North X East has had a very dramatic change recently. Would you believe that NxE has already had at least three layout changes in it’s first and only year? Compared are the current and previous designs. Which do you like better? I’m still not sure which I like more. I really like the header of the previous design, though I also like the small header-strip in the new one. Seriously, this guy is a good designer.

TechCrunch

Whoa! Big difference. The new one is definitely an improvement.

CNet

YELLOW! Ugh, I’m glad they changed that design… What’s with CNet and yellow? Every one of their designs has a bunch of yellow. Finally they’ve cut down on it.

CopyBlogger

The new one doesn’t look too bad, though the older one seems to be missing it’s logo. How are users supposed to know where they are without a logo?

CNN

I rarely visit CNN, so I’d forgotten about their old design (it looks too ’90s). The new design is pretty good, though. It’s sort of reminiscent of YouTube. Nice and clean, easy to view. Not bad.

Well, that’s all folks.

  • http://nutshelljournal.com/ V. Neely

    Be kind of neat to see a sequence of old page designs for one or two sites as well… “Now here we have Lycos, and as you can see it is soooo 1996.”

    I wonder if there are any sites that are dedicated to website styles of the 90s? It could be kind of like those TV shows that commemorate the 80s and 90s. ;)

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    That’s a cool idea. I could do a post series about that… I considered doing more than two shots apiece for each site, but decided against it for various reasons. Thanks for the idea!

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