In today’s digital world, the look and functionality of a website matters a lot. In fact, Forbes reports that 38% of internet users will stop interacting with a site if the layout is unattractive, while 39% of visitors will cease their engagement if a site’s images won’t load. Having autoplay ads, no contact information, slow page speeds, and outdated graphic design elements come into play, too. In many cases, it’s not merely about the content you include but how it’s presented.
But once upon a time, back in the internet’s infancy, that didn’t matter so much. Simply having a website was a pretty big deal. Of course, web design and development were barely even a “thing” back then. You may have forgotten how basic the most popular websites used to be — but the Web Design Museum hasn’t.
Thanks to this digital collection, you can browse a virtual time capsule of websites, which were live from 1995 to 2005. There are over 900 sites archived within the gallery, all to remind you of the early days of Facebook, eBay, and Apple (to see the world’s oldest website, courtesy of CERN, click here).
Although Google now receives over 100 billion searches every month, it wasn’t always as sleek as it is now. The 1998 version of the site looks like it could have been designed in Microsoft Word (or Geocities, that website-building gem). eBay’s old website looks as cluttered and chaotic as a spam site might circa now, while Amazon’s 2001 site is as boring as can be. Even Netflix’s site from 2002 looks comical and lame, with YouTube’s 2005 site looking sparse and strange compared to today’s version.
The Web Design Museum serves as a reminder of our humble beginnings in cyberspace and how far design has really come since then. You can search for a specific site, browse a timeline to see how a brand’s site has changed over the years, or just waste some time navigating along memory lane. And while you won’t necessarily glean any inspiration from these outdated techniques, you never know; the retro look and feel might come back around again someday. Even if it doesn’t, at least you can bask in the digital nostalgia for an afternoon and laugh at what was trending in web design back then.
