Website histories

Sometimes it’s necessary (or worthwhile) to go and check the history of a domain to find out how long a business has been online, or in operation.  It’s hard to tell the age of a site because technology and our age require that information is regularly updated.  And if you want to verify some facts, a good way to do it would be to verify the age of the site or the domain.  Plus you can have a giggle about how awful some sites were many years ago.

For example, if you were to check how long my domain has been operating using the Wayback Machine you’ll find that vadirectory.net has been in online since September 2002.  In fact, I shudder when I click on the snapshots they have of what my site used to look like. Boy, it’s come a long way since then.

However, I was using another domain before then, which is an Aussie domain asecretary.com.au.  Checking when that first showed up (and it still works today) you’ll find it was December 1998. Yuck, don’t look, it’s awful!

But we can go even further back than that as my original first site was with an Ozemail user address, before I got my first domain.  And the first snapshot they have is dated December 1996. I can see they didn’t capture my first attempt at a site in April of that same year. Evenso, what is available to view there is really horrid.  My own ability in web development (having progressed from an online do-it-yourself to Microsoft’s FrontPage, then Dreamweaver and now WordPress) has progressed considerably since those first days and I’m sure you can have a lot of fun looking at how your own site looked in the beginning versus what it looks like today.

So, if you’re looking for a bit of fun, or simply to verify or check the longevity of a site or domain, then using the Wayback Machine is a very useful tool.