It’s a little hard to believe, but this year marks the World Wide Web’s quarter century birthday—yes, 25 years of the Internet! The milestone brings with it a little bit of nostalgia and a lot of reminiscence as we here at RepricerExpress take a look back at the Internet as a toddler and the adult it has grown into.
CERN
No list would be complete or off to a good start without first including the site that started to bring the internet to the masses, CERN. Tim Berners-Lee may have been an ex-CERN employee at the time he created the World Wide Web, and he may not have envisioned it would one day be filled with videos of wet kittens and penguins sliding off icebergs, but the mark he made was undeniable.
In terms of what one of the first sites actually contained, it’s both impressive and disappointing. CERN’s site consisted of an h2 markup at the top, paragraph markups, and hyperlinks. Given that it was 25 years ago, it’s pretty snazzy, but it definitely pales in comparison to something more sophisticated like the RepricerExpress website.
Apple
The company with some of the best advertising and copywriting in history has undergone a major shift in page layout, making its products easier to find and pages easier to navigate. Here’s a look at their 1998 page, and here it is today.
Amazon
Only a year after Apple came out with their first website, the shopping giant Amazon followed suit. Their old page was quite simple and didn’t contain too much—it presented quite a stark contrast with what it looks like today but retains the brand in a strong way.
IMDb
Although it got its first start in 1989, it didn’t actually appear on the web for another four years. As with so many other sites, IMDb had a bit of a grassroots feel to it before gathering steam as the years rolled on, eventually exploding into one of the biggest movie sites on the net today.
Walmart
It’s a little hard to believe that Walmart jumped on the Internet wagon so late in the game (2000), especially since they were already the #1 store in America at that time. Known for cheap prices on every product, the retail giant—when it finally got a website—put its thousands of stores into one central location only a click away.
Take a look at their first site here, and notice how much text there is (since replaced with high-quality images). Another thing that Walmart’s since corrected is moving their store locator feature from the bottom right into a bigger and more prominent location in their current site.
Pizza Hut
While the capacity of the Internet back when Pizza Hut had its first page in 1994 probably took as long just to get online and order the pizza as it did to deliver it, it was more of a trailblazing step than an easier route. Since then, Pizza Hut has expanded to letting users order pizzas through Xbox 360 and smartphones, and perhaps eventually breaking into thought-ordering in the future.
Putting it all into Context
Of course, it’s quite nostalgic to look back to see how some big brands approached the Internet when it started to gain momentum. Whilst some of the sites look a little sparse and text-heavy, it’s important to remember the context in which they were built—slow access speeds, low-resolution screens, limited browser functionality etc. Context is everything when trying to make a success of online selling—whether your customers see your products on Amazon, eBay, Rakuten’s Play.com or your own webstore, you need to keep your inventory accessible across the various devices users access the Internet on now, you need to ensure your products are priced competitively against the competition and you need to make your products accessible to more and more shoppers who can potentially buy from you.
Conclusion
I have no doubt the websites we access in the next 25 years will look and function nothing like the ones we use today. We can only imagine at the marvels technology will bring to our buying experience, but some things will remain ultimately important—competitive pricing, excellent customer service, fast delivery—all those things we know won’t change, we should always aim to improve.
