Launch Day

September 9, 2009 at 4:55 am · Filed under Design, Geek Culture & Tech

The Telegraph have an article on how some very popular websites looked when they first launched. It is quite amusing to look at them, because sometimes, you actually used in it’s first version, and it’s just like damn, has it been that long? Othertimes, it looked so ugly that you can’t believe the standards were that bad.

I’m sticking my favorite examples here, but check out the whole list on The Telegraph.

Google.com – launched in 1996. Hard to believe how ugly the logo was. I still find it hideous. Also, Google’s homepage is much simpler now.


Facebook.com – launched in 2004. Hard to believe that FB was this ugly in only 2004. It looks like it was created in ’97.

Yahoo.com – launched in 1994. I think Yahoo looked similar for quite some time. Quite impressive I think for 1994.

YouTube, 2005, hard to believe that it was this ugly, huh?

Amazon.com – launched in 1995. Amazing piece of webdesign for 1995. Amazon has kept true to the spirit of its first design for almost 15 years. It’s also extremely functional and yet quite well designed.

Nytimes.com – launched in 1995. I love how this looks like a newspaper, complete with the ads on top and the lines below the logo. So cool.

Bonus, And Far Away’s first ever design, in 2004.




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  • http://meshx86.wordpress.com Mesh

    Google’s logo seemed to be a color pattern test in a computer monitor :P

  • http://bujassem.blogspot.com BuJ

    Wow.. you actually kept your first template? very impressive!

    Brilliant post in my opinion.. especially the commentary on them.. probably Amazon must be my fav site.. and i still remember i was in school when google was launched and we were talking to our math teacher about google and googleplex numbers which we just studied a few months back.. damn.. makes me feel old.. it feels like google is just a couple of years old.. instead it dates back from the 20th century!

  • Revelation

    donno if you guys knew, a very good resource(excellent i must say) is Web Archive (http://web.archive.org), which archives and keeps a full track of all pages on the web, you can actually see the progress there :).
    P.S.: according to Web Archive the page “http://andfaraway.net/” was available for archiving in May 2005 ;)

  • Revelation

    for some reason the link is broken in my above comment, the URL is http://web.archive.org