Posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2015 by Will Hagle
Startup Timelines shows you how websites’ home pages have evolved over time.
Websites are constantly evolving. Your favorite sites that you check regularly today probably looked completely different five or ten years ago. Sites are updated to add new information, change with design trends, or to completely rebrand a company. Thankfully, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine allows us to travel back through Internet time in order to get a sense of how the web looked in a different era. Thankfully, again, Startup Timelines has simplified the process of digging through those archives. The site’s creator used The Wayback Machine as a resource, taking screenshots of home pages and uploading them in order to show how various websites have evolved over time.
Sites like Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, Dailymotion, Dropbox, Instagram and Lyft are all archived on Startup Timelines. The site is populated with tons of examples of how home pages evolve over time. If you look at Startup Timelines’ homepage, its filled with GIF-like animations of other webpages as they appeared from the first time they launched until now. If you click on a particular site, you can scroll through a more detailed timeline of how that site’s design has evolved. It’s interesting to see the choices the web designers made as time went on in a particular company’s history. It’s also easier to look through Startup Timelines than it is to search through the Wayback Machine, so head over to the site and check it out (before it inevitably changes).
