Old website designs:
the web's giants, then and now

The table shows each site's launch year, what it looked like and the Wayback Machine snapshot to open.

Table: Famous websites at launch and where to see them (Internet Archive; years are launch years, snapshots are the earliest useful captures)

The first website goes online at CERN

1991

The Wayback Machine starts saving the web

1996

Median mobile home page, 2015 → 2025

845 KB → 2,362 KB

Top speed of a dial-up modem in 1998

56 kbps

The first website was a description of itself. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, wrote a proposal for a hypertext system in 1989, built the first web server and browser on a NeXT computer in 1990, and made the web available to the public in 1991². The first page explained what the World Wide Web was and how to join it¹. It has no images, no colour beyond the default blue of links, and no layout. It still loads instantly, which is more than most modern pages manage.

The web became visual in 1993, when the NCSA Mosaic browser displayed images inside pages rather than in separate windows. Netscape Navigator, built by many of the same people, followed in 1994 and dominated the first browser war.

The first commercial websites were lists. Before search engines worked well, people found sites through directories, and early shops were essentially catalogues.

Yahoo (1994)

Yahoo began in January 1994 as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", a list of links kept by two Stanford graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo. By the 1996 snapshot⁵ it was a page of category headings (Arts, Business, Computers, Education) with sub-links, each site added by a human editor. As the web grew past what people could curate, the directory model lost to search.

Amazon (1995)

Jeff Bezos opened Amazon.com in July 1995 as an online bookstore. The 1999 capture⁴ shows the classic early-commerce page: a grey and white table layout, blue links, a narrow column of categories and small book covers. Its lasting design ideas were functional rather than visual: customer reviews, one-click ordering (patented in 1999) and recommendations based on what other customers bought.

eBay (1995)

Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb in September 1995; it became eBay in 1997. The 1997 page is a dense list of auction categories and items, with no images on the home page at all. Its innovation was the feedback score, an early form of social proof that let strangers trust each other.

Google's homepage was the most influential design decision of the early web, and it was mostly a decision to leave things out. In 1998 its rivals, Yahoo, Excite and Lycos, were "portals": home pages crammed with news, weather, stock prices, horoscopes and advertising. Google showed a logo, a search box and two buttons³.

The empty page loaded fast on dial-up, and it told people exactly what to do. In behavioural terms it removed choices: Hick's law says decision time grows with the number of options, and Google's page offered one. Google's later obsession with measurement became famous too: when designer Douglas Bowman left in 2009 he wrote that the company had tested 41 shades of blue for a link¹².

Wikipedia (2001)

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on 15 January 2001. Its earliest pages were plain wiki software: text, links and an "edit this page" link on every page. The design principle, that anyone can change any page, mattered far more than the look.

IRCTC (2002)

For many Indians the first website that mattered was the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation's, which began selling train tickets online in 2002¹⁴. The early pages were dense, government-blue forms. They replaced hours in a booking queue, which made people tolerate almost any interface: an example of how strong motivation can carry poor usability, as the Fogg behaviour model predicts.

Facebook (2004)

Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders launched thefacebook.com on 4 February 2004 for Harvard students. The 2004 snapshot⁶ shows a pale blue bar, a small grainy header image and a short welcome text. The profile was a structured form, which made Facebook feel orderly next to MySpace's customisable, often chaotic pages. Facebook opened to anyone over 13 in September 2006.

YouTube (2005)

YouTube's founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, registered the domain in February 2005. Karim uploaded the first video, "Me at the zoo", on 23 April 2005: 19 seconds in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo⁸. Early versions of the site carried the slogan "Tune In, Hook Up", a trace of an early dating-site idea. The end-of-2005 snapshot⁷ shows the slogan "Broadcast Yourself" and a grid of small thumbnails.

Twitter (2006)

Twitter began as "twttr", a side project at the podcasting start-up Odeo. Jack Dorsey posted the first public tweet on 21 March 2006: "just setting up my twttr". The 140-character limit came from SMS, which allowed 160 characters, minus room for a username. A design constraint borrowed from the phone network became the product's identity.

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both former Amazon employees, started Flipkart in Bengaluru in October 2007 as an online bookstore. The 2008–2009 capture¹³ shows a white page of book listings with a search bar. Its most important design decision was not visual: cash on delivery, introduced in 2010, solved the trust problem of paying online that held Indian e-commerce back.

Three findings from usability research explain why the giants converged on similar layouts over time.

• Study competitors' history, not just their present — open their Wayback Machine timeline and see which changes they kept for years.
• Launch narrow — Amazon sold books, Facebook served one university, Flipkart sold books in India: a narrow first version is normal.
• Keep one primary action per page — Google's page proves that a single obvious task beats a crowded menu.
• Budget page weight — set a limit (for example, under 1 MB for a landing page) and check it before every release.
• Follow conventions where people expect them — innovate in your product, not in where the search box sits.

If your site has grown cluttered over the years, a SaaS UX audit can find which elements people still use and which only add weight.

Launch dates come from the companies' own pages, CERN and the W3C. Every "then" link points to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; the web addresses use a year, and the Archive opens the nearest saved copy, so the exact date you land on may differ slightly. Page-weight figures come from the HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac. Screenshots are from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each one; modern websites are not shown as screenshots because their designs are copyrighted, so open the live sites for comparison. Last reviewed October 2026.