In General, Tips Mar 4, 200938
A Decade Of Web Design In Pictures – 1997 to 2009
By reviewing what’s changed and what’s stood the test of time, we can make general assumptions of web design principles that will work going forward. Things have moved on in terms of interface design and graphics, some websites more than others. Looking at the examples below sites such as Amazon, eBay and Craigslist have changed comparatively little (Craigslist has hardly changed at all), a testimony to their forward thinking at the time, whilst others such as the Whitehouse have come a long way.
Whitehouse 1997 – 2009
Microsoft 1999 – 2009
Digg 2004 – 2009
(note 2004 CSS styling maybe missing)
CNN 2000 – 2009
BBC 2000 – 2009
Facebook 2006 – 2009
SmashingMagazine 2006 – 2009
Ebay 1999 – 2009
Amazon 1999 – 2009
Craigslist 1999 – 2009
Apple 1999 – 2009
Wordpress 2003 – 2009
(note 2003 CSS styling maybe missing)
Oakley 2000 – 2009
Techcrunch 2005 – 2009
(note 2005 CSS styling maybe missing)
Google 1999 – 2009
Yahoo 1997 – 2009
Other patterns can be seen, design centric companies such as Apple and Oakley consistently focus on design, whilst news based websites such as CNN and the BBC have only modernized the traditional news & picture format.
38 Comments
Mar 4, 2009
Although I’ve seen loads of these articles, comparing “old” layouts with new (current) one, it’s still pretty cool to see.
Also, I can’t imagine Wordpress & Digg looking like that: It’s like as if the CSS wasn’t parsed correctly.
Pretty funny to see that some didn’t really change that much (Google / Yahoo!).
Keep up the good work!
Mar 4, 2009
Lovely!
I still keep my old homepage in each new redesign, it’s always fun to see
All the Best!
Simmessa.com
Mar 4, 2009
Nice article, and a point well made!
I would point out a few errors though! Google didn’t look like that in 1999 – It didn’t even look like that in 1997 – that is a pre release look from 1996 or so.
The same thing with Wordpress and Tech crunch. I assume you got the images from waybackmachine which doesn’t always pick up the themes.
The whitehouse is possibly the very best example there – really impressed with the idea though – will visit your site again!
Mar 4, 2009
Looking to all these site above on images and a very nice comparision you have given for different years and now i feel that web design principle is really moving very fast.
Mar 4, 2009
Nice bit of social commentary as well, Yahoo 2009 news article – ‘Teen pimped classmates’. That wouldn’t have happened in ’97!
Mar 4, 2009
I think the key point to take away from this is that the way back machine doesn’t actually do such a great job of preserving the presentational layer!
Interesting nonetheless.
Mar 4, 2009
@foul, Macro and Nathan, yes agreed, the wayback machine does tend to miss the styling, so I’ve added notes under those.
Mar 4, 2009
Typo: It says: Craigsist. Must be Craiglist
Nice to see a lot has changed and other things stays the same.
Search bars stays, looong descriptions gone.
Silla!
Mar 4, 2009
Really great idea for an article! It’s so interesting to consider Google in beta stage, and relatively unheard of. I remember some guy in my computer class at school telling me about some new website called Google that I’d never heard of
Mar 4, 2009
Would love to see more analysis on this aside from the fact that the layouts have changed… perhaps some chat on how functionality, load times, expectations, etc. has changed as well!
Mar 4, 2009
Great Post, You’ve got to love the evolution of web typography! Typography is probably the biggest difference in the old vs new designs.
Mar 4, 2009
@Christy, yes great ideas for a follow up post.
Mar 4, 2009
Wow, I don’t remember most of those but I certainly remember Yahoo. Back in the day, that WAS the internet. If it wasn’t in the Yahoo directory, it may as well not have existed for me.
Mar 4, 2009
I remember when the Internet was just BBs.
Mar 4, 2009
Its interesting to see how some of these visual designs haven’t altered radically. Particularly with Google, keeping it so simple and functional for so long, something surely even Dieter Rams would admire. However, its a shame there’s no depiction of the technological evolution of these sites, which, again with Google in mind, I’d imagine are mind blowing.
Mar 5, 2009
[...] A Decade Of Web Design In Pictures – 1997 to 2009 | Design Reviver Awesome memories in web design! (tags: webdesign design inspiration article 2009 history) [...]
Mar 5, 2009
[...] http://designreviver.com/tips/a-decade-in-web-design-1997-to-2009-in-pictures/ [...]
Mar 5, 2009
[...] Reviver takes a look back at over a decade of design through the changes of several major websites. We’ve come a long way in our layouts and use of typography
By reviewing what’s changed [...]
Mar 5, 2009
This was fun!
Sadly too many sites still look like they are stuck in the 90’s.
Thanks for a nice post.
Mar 5, 2009
Wow, what a blast from the past. Great post! Remember when net zero was actually free and evey one used aol? Glad those days are over.
Mar 5, 2009
Superb demonstration of the amount of bloat and garbage that has clogged up the web. The older web designs weren’t weighed down with superfluous pictures, they didn’t require waiting long minutes for useless shaded header graphics and worthless large pictures to load. Ask yourself: what function does the huge picture actually serve on the whitehouse site? None. It’s pure eye candy…but it clogs up the cable modem, slows down the loading of the site, turns the whole site into sludge and makes it unresponsible.
This offers a perfectly illustration of how unusable the web has become, all courtesy of big huge useless graphics, pretty-looking and superfluous shaded headers, pointlessly glitzy rounded corners done by loading gifs into tables (all of which slows the web browser down to a crawl while it paints all this garbage on your screen), and most of all, the useless worthless incredibly slow and crash-inducing macromedia flash.
You can see the degeneration of the world wide web with perfect clarity. People who wonder why so many web pages take 20 seconds or 30 seconds or 40 seconds or a whole minute to load on today’s 7 megabit connections need look no farther. The jerkoff web designers are the ones to blame. They clogged up the web with useless worthless pointless graphics and flash and junk like multiple embedded tables, gave us no new content — often much less content per page than in 1997, with a tiny little landing strip of text in the center of the page and huge globs of ads and blogrolls and click-throughs and other worthless junk on the left and right of the main text — and tried, ignorantly and foolishly, to turn the web into TV with macromedia flash. If you want to watch TV, turn on the television. The web is text. But of course web designers are too ignorant and too incompetent to realize that, and that’s why so much of the web has become so thoroughly unusable today.
Of course the kooks and cranks and flakes who adore web “design” will immediately burst out with ridicule, so let’s just deal with some facts here. The hard cold fact is that despite connection speeds skyrocketing, web surfing has become much slower over the past 12 years. Want proof?
Here’s proof. Hard numbers. Why your internet experience is so slow. And it’s getting worse, not better.
Web design destroyed the web. And if it keeps on this way, pretty soon, it’ll take 5 minutes to display even the simplest web page, and no one will bother. Thanks, web designers. Like Michael Brown at Hurricane Katrina, you’ve done a heckuva job.
Mar 6, 2009
@mclaren – that’s why good CSS design is required, as it can make great results without having to load lots of images. So what’s your take on video on the web?
Mar 6, 2009
Great products rocks and design will happen
Mar 9, 2009
@mclaren – I’m guessing you’re a programmer or server admin? You’re comment is a little ridiculous I mean “kooks and cranks and flakes who adore web “design”” c’mon are you serious?
Mar 12, 2009
@mclaren, you are so stupid you shouldn’t even be allowed to use the internet.
All those massive companies/ governments who redesigned their sites and you think you know better? It’s not just web designers who want redesigns, marketeers, usability experts….wow, even programmers do.
Every one of those redesigns makes the site easier to use, easier to read and generally more effective at achieving it’s function by maybe adding a few seconds to download time. It’s not 2005 anymore r*tard, talking about Flash sites and stuff.
Mar 14, 2009
nice
Mar 20, 2009
Thanks a interesting post
You can see more: http://tr.im/hAHq
Mar 23, 2009
Wow! BCC looks so much better and cleaner than it did before. Its interesting to see the changes over the years. I didn’t really notice that much until now and seeing the various websites side by side.
Mar 27, 2009
Funny how some sites advanced light years a head and others didn’t improve all that much from a decade ago lol
May 13, 2009
I remember my first web designs back in ‘94 using HotDog (one of the first HTML editors). Back then iexplorer didn’t even exist, I used Mosaic and Netscape. Man! things have changed so much ever since!
Great post!
Sep 6, 2009
[...] More here: A Decade Of Web Design In Pictures – 1997 to 2009 | Design Reviver [...]
Sep 12, 2009
This article remember all the past of design.
Sep 21, 2009
[...] A Decade Of Web Design In Pictures – 1997 to 2009 | Design Reviver. [...]
Dec 4, 2009
Great selection of Websites, some really nice designs! I’m currently working on a new design. I also love the look behind. thx
Dec 21, 2009
Great artical.. nice work and also nice work from the designer and the developers of the sites
Jan 9, 2010
[...] this article about the decade that was in web design. (Note: an earlier version of this was done here.) It was not much more than a before and after look at the most popular websites out there. Of [...]
Jan 22, 2010
Thanks for providing this information.
Jan 24, 2010
Great article, this article show a lot of things happen in decade.
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