Tag Archives: Websites Through The Years

Apple Inc is the maker of the worlds coolest computers, as I’m sure you already know. Their website has, for the last few years, been very innovative and has started several design trends. What has Apple’s website like in the past? Let’s find out, with a little help from the Wayback Machine. Ready? Let’s get started.

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The oldest (and best) Harry Potter website, The Leaky Cauldron, has just updated their layout today. It seems like a good opportunity to feature them on Websites Through The Years.

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Blogger, perhaps the most famous free blog provider, pretty much kick-started the blog phenomenon. Though Blogger doesn’t measure up with a self-hosted WordPress installation, it’s a heck of a lot better than LiveJournal and WordPress.com.

October 12, 1999

Not much, is it? This is blogger when it first started. Back then there was no Blog*Spot hosting service. You had to host the files on your own web space. Too bad the Wayback Machine can’t get at the administration pages, it would be cool to see what the write post page used to look like. Oh well.

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Ars Technica is one of my favorite tech news sites. Though they’ve been around since 1998, they’ve had very few layout redesigns. Nowadays they have an ultra-cool design, but they didn’t start out that way…

April 22, 1999

I despise (most) designs with a black background and white text. It’s hard on the eyes, and come on, that color scheme should have died with DOS!

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Welcome back to Websites Through The Years! Today we tackle CNet, one of the oldest tech sites. We’ll start with the earliest design the Wayback Machine could find: October 1996.

October 22, 1996

Nothing says “90s” like a design like that! Okay… The yellow is a little hard on the eyes, but other than that it’s not too bad for the ’90s. My biggest complaint: Their shameless touting of Internet Exploder, er Explorer. Obviously I maniacally support Mozilla Firefox (download now, quantities are unlimited!).

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After the success of Web Sites Before and After, I decided to start an article series going more in-depth about the various websites. In Websites Through The Years, I’ll be picking some designs and, with the help of the Wayback Machine, going over the various stages of the sites’ lives. We’ll start with Yahoo.

October 17, 1996

This is as far as the Wayback Machine goes. As you can see, Yahoo wasn’t a “portal” like it is today. Back in ’96, it was just a web directory, albeit a very popular directory. Take a look at the design. Reminiscent of Google, with just a logo and a quantity of links, it’s a very simplistic page by today’s standards (being a mid-90s design helps…). Yahoo has since ditched the minimalistic method of design, opting for a more image-heavy design.

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