It's sort of hard to get nostalgic about websites, for a couple of reasons. First, the World Wide Web hasn't been around that long, just since 1989, and I doubt that too many of the people reading this blog entry were actually surfing the web in 1989. The mid '90's is when most of us ventured out into "cyberspace" as it was called then. So must of us have only been surfing for a decade and a half. It's hard to get nostalgic about something that isn't that old.
Moreover, even if you DID have a favorite site way back in 1998, you can't really relive the experience by going to the site today. Over the last 11 years that web site, if it's still around at all, has been redesigned probably 4 or 5 times. You can't go back.
Or can you? Thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, you can type an address in and see what websites looked like years and years ago. Visit microsoft.com as it looked on February 22, 1999, and note that it proudly trumpets that Windows 98 was the best selling software of the year 1998. Visit Amazon.com from March of 2000 and note that there were only about 8 different Amazon online departments, instead of the dozens online now. Or visit Yahoo.com from 1996 and see a site in its infancy.
Those sites appeal to the general population, I guess. For me, though, I enjoy seeing my school district's website from 1998, which was right about the time I took over the district site. I wasn't sure then and I'm not sure now what the leaves were supposed to represent. I also like visiting the high school's website circa 2002, when my Integrated Web Design class was creating and updating the website. And the first web address I ever typed into a web browser was NBC.com in 1996, and it pretty much looked like this.
You can play around yourself at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
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