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Way Back Wednesday: Guardian.co.uk

by Chris Mead | 06.02.2013

Welcome to another weekly blast from the past in the form of Way Back Wednesday, where we travel back in time using the Internet Archive’s Way Back machine to show you the evolution of websites.

We’ve gone back further than normal today – all the way back to 1996 in fact – to show you The Guardian.

The Guardian has a rich digital history and is generally known for it’s bold foray into new media by publishing free content and successfully engaging users through its comment section, blogs and comment is free site, to become the UK’s 2nd most popular newspaper website.

Although they’ve shifted their Facebook app focus recently towards their website, they were still very much early adopters in this regard – and this is evident with the option to sign in to the Guardian using your Facebook account visible in the screenshot below.

When exploring websites of old, I always find it interesting to look at categories listed and their design placement; which reflects readers’ interests, societal changes and the newspaper’s own positioning. In the Guardian’s case, we see a convergence of categories from the Observer and separate sites to make today’s centralized source of news, with the like’s of football and cricket merging into sports, and the emergence of Tech, Politics, Women and Law.

Don’t forget to click on the image for a closer look.

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