I was just browsing the November ‘06 CSS Reboot screenshots to see if I could pick up some cool new site design ideas or spot someone I know. I came upon a site that had done a pretty good new design for its reboot, only the site didn’t have a screenshot for the earlier design. I was really curious to see what the earlier site looked like because the site owner said the new design was 100 times better than the old design. I wanted to see “100 times better than what?” So how do I get a glimpse of what the site looked like earlier?

Enter The Wayback Machine.

Periodic Site Snapshots

The Wayback Machine is run by web.archive.org as a free public service. The Wayback Machine has a crawler (actually, probably several) that goes out on the web and takes “snapshots” of web sites which it stores in its archive. The crawlers typically visit several times a month so that the archive is updated (hopefully) with each important web site change. All of these snapshots are available for curious visitors to browse through and laugh at bad old designs or get all sentimental about earlier, sometimes better, versions of web sites.

The Wayback Machine has records from as early as 1996, so it’s very easy to see the earlier site designs of just about everything—the vast majority of web sites have come online after 1996. There are even a few entries of DiamondLime.com, although the snapshots kind of got a little bit hacked, and for some reason the crawlers stopped taking new shots after May of 2006. It’s especially fun to pick a big web site that has been around for a long time, like Yahoo or Apple.

Because the information is sometimes a little patchy, and because The Wayback Machine stores snapshots instead of full web sites, it’s mostly an interesting visual/design tool—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun or useful. For example, I came away with a deep feeling of appreciation for how far web design has come after looking at a few sites from 1996!