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In 1999, Google was introduced as “a new search engine,” Apple advertised the Power Mac G4, and The Onion laid out its pages with frames. Those snapshots can feel startlingly unfamiliar beside today’s versions of the same brands. The phrase “ten years ago” comes from Jennifer Farley’s 2009 retrospective: she looked back from that year to websites captured in 1999, not ten years back from today.
What the ten 1999 websites reveal
Jennifer Farley’s “Ten Web Sites, Ten Years Ago,” published August 17, 2009 and updated February 29, 2024, uses Internet Archive Wayback Machine captures to revisit ten prominent websites as they appeared in 1999. It is a visual design retrospective, not a usability test or a ranking of the sites by traffic.
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The selection ranges from technology companies and media outlets to a job board and the White House. Considered together, the pages show different approaches to layout, navigation, visual density, and brand identity at a particular moment in the web’s development.
How the ten sites looked
| Site | What the 1999 snapshot shows |
|---|---|
| Apple.com | A clean-looking page advertising the Power Mac G4. |
| Amazon.com | A liquid layout and an overall structure Farley describes as surprisingly similar to the site’s later form. |
| BBC | News coverage of the murder of Jill Dando. |
| Microsoft.com | A promotion for downloading Internet Explorer 5. |
| Wired Magazine | A major editorial presence on the web. |
| Yahoo! | A preview of a new homepage, following a period of relative visual consistency. |
| Monster.com | A long-running job-search site associated with CVs submitted by job seekers. |
| The Onion | A site using frames, a layout technique that has since become obsolete. |
| The White House | The most dramatically changed site among the ten, according to Farley. |
| A search engine described with the line, “Oh look! A new search engine.” |
Layout, density, and the desktop web
Farley characterizes the 1999 web as smaller and visually uneven: pages often used tables for layout, some relied on questionable background images or blinking text, and narrow page widths could leave large white margins. The screenshots in the retrospective were captured at 1280×800, a reminder that a page’s appearance depends partly on the viewport used to view it.
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The sites do not all follow one design recipe. Amazon’s liquid layout contrasts with the fixed or narrow compositions common in the period, while The Onion’s frames show a structural choice that later fell out of use. These examples are useful comparisons, not proof that every site used the same techniques.
Navigation changed along with the look
Early web navigation also reflected a different idea of what a website was for. In her 2014 essay, Olia Lialina describes how many personal and amateur sites maintained lists of external links, with authors taking responsibility for helping visitors find their way around the web. She contrasts that habit with a later web shaped more by search engines and portals, and by sites that linked outward less often.
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That history helps explain why a 1999 page may feel more like a directory or collection of destinations than a modern, tightly bounded service. It is a broad pattern, not a description of every site in Farley’s selection.
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Brand continuity does not mean an unchanged website
Some pages preserve a recognizable purpose or broad structure even when their visual conventions belong to another era. Farley points to Amazon as especially similar in overall structure to its later form, while calling the White House site the most dramatically changed example. That contrast makes the snapshots valuable: familiar names can retain an identity even as layout, navigation, and presentation evolve.
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The comparison has limits. The retrospective does not provide controlled usability testing, a complete traffic ranking for the ten sites in 1999, or a current, like-for-like visual comparison. Its evidence is the archived appearance and the observations Farley makes about it.
The web’s rapid expansion around the turn of the century
The Webby Awards’ 2005 retrospective gives a sense of the wider change: it cites 16 million people online in 1995 and more than 957 million in 2005. These are broad estimates of people online, not visitor counts for the ten websites. Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain described the dot-com boom as a period that “catapult[ed] the internet into the mainstream,” bringing hundreds of millions of people online in a short time.
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Farley’s personal memories offer a smaller-scale view of making websites in that period. She recalls writing HTML in Notepad, editing images with Paint Shop Pro, being excited when her company bought Macromedia Flash 4, and later obtaining Photoshop 5. Those are her recollections, not a universal account of the tools every web designer used.
Why the snapshots still make a useful comparison
Looking across these ten pages is less about deciding which design was “best” than noticing what changed: how layouts used screen space, how navigation connected pages to the wider web, how much visual material crowded a page, and which brands remained recognizable through redesigns. The captures also preserve a moment when techniques such as frames and table-based layouts were part of ordinary web design, even though later sites moved away from them.
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