Six Top Sites That Sucked
August 28, 2007
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Are you building your first website? Worried that the design might not be quite up to scratch? I hate designing too, and to cheer myself up when it’s not going well, I look to the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine will show you what some of the top Internet sites looked like a few years ago. Here are six of my favourite sites. They’re all really cool sites now, and each pulls heaps of traffic and make their owners a ton of cash. But, they haven’t always looked so great. In fact, I’m sure the owners would agree that at one time, their sites were plain ugly.
Joel Comm - Joel obviously had less cash to spend on site design back then. Click here to visit Joel’s site over 4 years ago.
Shoemoney - I love Shoemoney’s blog. But, it must have looked awful in the beginning because he won’t let anybody see it. Click here to see how Shoemoney has blocked us from viewing his site on Wayback.
Problogger - My favourite blogging tips blog. It’s just had a cool makeover. But, it didn’t always look so cool. Click here to check out Problogger in February 2005.
John Chow - The evil blogger has also recently revamped his site. I bet he’s glad it doesn’t look like this now. There wasn’t a car in site back in 2000 but you could click to listen to the music! To be fair to John - he didn’t update the site until Dec 05, and you can see the revamped version here. If you read John’s blog now, the first post might seem a bit deja vu.
Moneysupermarket recently floated on the stockmarket. Check out how the site looked in 2003. You’d never have guessed that the owners would become multi-millionaires with a design like that.
Craigslist is probably the most profitable of ugly sites on the Internet. It’s making millions for it’s owners. And believe it or not - it actually looked better way back in 2000 than it does now.
I hope this post has given you a bit of encouragement. At least now you know that the sites that are cool today were far from cool yesterday. So there’s definitely plenty of hope for you too. You can work on improving it as you go, like those great sites did. And if you’re looking for an easy to use design tool that you can use to build a website in 90 minutes, I highly recommend XSitePro. Click here for more information on XSitePro
Comments
5 Responses to “Six Top Sites That Sucked”
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It looks like John Chow never really hit it off with Google.
I go back and look at my blog that I had in 2004 and pat myself on the back because I no longer do memes every other post.
These are some of top blog. I visit them daily too just as you. Problogger and John Chow is one of them.
This is my first time visiting your blog and may I suggest something?
You should put picture on your blog for easier reading. I tend to read more when I see relevant picture.
Nice blog and keep it up!
Cath,
Did you use XSite Pro to design this site? I’m wondering whether to stop using colleagues and outsiders and learn about web-desing myself.
Have you used XSite to incorporate an aweber subscription widget? Want to find out how to design a nice-looking subscription panel for aweber and be able to quickly add it to the site.
Bloggrrl - I had to look up what memes were as I didn’t have a clue. Are they like those posts where everyone blogs about the same thing - eg - 8 things about me?
Thanks Shaun. I will have a go at adding pictures. I would love to change the theme too once I get more used to wordpress.
Ian - this blog is just a wordpress theme and the site is XSitePro (site header is photoshop). Your site is excellent and loads superfast, but it would be good if you had more control over adding additional content. XSitePro is easy to use.
I haven’t had a go at making decent aweber widgets yet but I bet they’re quite easy. Rosalind Gardener seems to experiment with a few different ones over at http://www.netprofitstoday.com and I bet she would tell you what she used to make them if you asked..