There's an interesting post over on the Political Wire blog that looks back in the Internet Archive to see what the political parties websites look like when they first appeared on the web.
Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party were "late to the game" having registered a domain in 1996 but not seemingly putting anything on it, so the first archive was in until November 2000. Labour and the Lib Dems were ahead of their game, although they did seem to have a fancy for the horrible use of background images from Frontpage Xpress!
Hat Tip: Political Wire
7 comments:
This is strange - I certainly found an older Tory one than that (it has Major on the front) on Wayback Machine before - there was a different address you had to use, I think it was www.tory.org..?
Got it, there you go:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961101074601/http://www.conservative-party.org.uk/
The White House one is also fantastic:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202165238/www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Welcome-nt.html
It has fluttering American flags, and keeps mentioning this thingamajig called 'electronic mail'.
Thanks dynamite, I have now added the 1996 version of the Conservative homepage to the story.
God this is fantastic - I remember these sites now. They were all designed in Frontpage - and look like there were done by a five year old.
Shows how the technology has changed so much in a decade!
Dynamite,
I remember the 1996 version of the Tory website whose URL you give. Not only that, the link from "Our Values" is broken, just like on the original -- such inadvertant honesty!
Am I the only one who feels wistfully nostalgic looking at this crap?
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