Website Design – How Far We’ve Come

The very first website was launched on August 6, 1991.

It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and ran on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN. It was a basic website that provided information about the World Wide Web project.

This is what it looked like.

Pretty basic stuff. Just text and some hyperlinks.

Since then, over 1,000,000,000 websites have been launched (http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/) and technology has changed dramatically.

I thought I’d have some fun and have a look at what some of the most popular websites looked like when they were first launched, compared to what they look like now. I used the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/web.php) to have a look at some of the early websites. Here are a few “then and now” screen shots.

Hope you enjoy!

Google – Dec 2, 1998

 

Google – Feb 13, 2015

 

 

Yahoo – Oct 7, 1998

Yahoo – Feb 13, 2015

Apple – July 15, 1997

 

Apple – Feb 15, 2015

 

 

Microsoft – Feb 3, 1999

 

Microsoft – Feb 13, 2015

 

CBC – Dec 22, 1996

 

CBC – Feb 13, 2015