From the Internet Archives: The ancient design of your favorite websites
The A — Z of famous landing pages from a time long, long ago.
Some time ago I was working on a lecture about the importance of unique value proposition in UX design process. One of the hints I wanted to give my students was that in many cases older (or first) versions of big brands’ UVPs can be better benchmarks than those that these companies are using today.
In many cases: the older the brand, the more its UVP is being replaced by a slogan.
And since I wanted to illustrate this process with an example, I thought — hm, let’s see what the first MailChimp’s UVP was, and if it changed much. So I went to Web Archive to look for some old version of MailChimp website and a few minutes later… I got sucked into this research completely.
Not to mention the feeling of nostalgia.
I jotted down a short list of websites that are popular today and then started taking screenshots of their predecessors. For some reason these companies succeeded, and perhaps it was their well-built websites what helped them with it. I believe there’s a lot that business owners, product-, UX-, visual designers, copywriters etc. could learn from studying the past.
My short list soon became the list so I thought I could share the results of this research. Hence this post.
So here they are, ordered A — Z. Sit back, relax, turn your clock back and enjoy.
Adobe
- 2002
- 2004
Amazon
- 2000
- 2001
- 2005
Apple
- 2000
- 2001
- 2007
Basecamp
- 2004
- 2005
- 2007
- 2011
Buffer
- 2011
Campaign Monitor
- 2004
- 2006
Chrome
- 2008
Dribbble
- 2010
- 2011
Dropbox
- 2010
eBay
- 2000
- 2007
Etsy
- 2007
Evernote
- 2009
Facebook (a.k.a. Thefacebook)
- 2004
- 2005
- 2006
- 2007
- 2008
Firefox
- 2004
GitHub
- 2009
GoDaddy
- 2004
- 1998
- 2005
HubSpot
- 2006
- 2009
IDEO
- 2000
IMDb
- 2001
- 2002
- 2011
- 2012
Intercom
- 2011
Jira
- 2007
jQuery
- 2006
Kickstarter
- 2010
Kissmetrics
- 2008
- 2010
LiveChat
- 2006
- 2009
MailChimp
- 2001
- 2005
Mashable
- 2005
- 2007
Medium
- 2012
Microsoft
- 1996
- 1999
- 2002
NASA
- 1996
- 1999
- 2001
- 2004
Opera
- 1999
- 2001
- 2003
PayPal
- 2001
- 2002
- 2006
- 2010
- 2010
- 2012
Product Hunt
- 2014
- 2005
- 2006
Samsung
- 1996
- 1997
- 2000
Shopify
- 2006
- 2008
- 2010
Slack
- 2014
- 2015
Snapchat
- 2012
Spotify
- 2007
- 2009
- 2011
TNW
- 2008
- 2009
Tumblr
- 2007
- 2009
- 2006
- 2008
- 2009
Uber
- 2011
Vimeo
- 2005
- 2007
Wikipedia
- 2002
- 2004
Xero
- 2010
- 2007
YouTube
- 2006
- 2007
Zapier
- 2012
Zendesk
- 2010
That’s it. A lot has changed, huh?
I’ll probably return to the initial subject of UVPs in the near future, so if you are interested ☞ follow me. Also, if you enjoyed this post ☞ ❤︎. Cheers!
If there’s a website you think I should also add to this list, feel free to leave a comment!
Thank you, Alina, for helping me with putting it all together!
