This blog post is proudly sponsored by:
Affiliate Marketing Blog - Read About The Latest Tactics

Evolution is defined as ‘any process of formation or growth; development’. In order to be successful in the dot com industry, you must learn to adapt and evolve. Web sites have to stay current with the latest trends or they risk losing visitors, or even worse folding all together. Yahoo! is the perfect example of an ever evolving website. Their new innovations and designs helped them not only survive the dot com bust, but come out even stronger. Today they are one of the most visted websites in the world (#1 on Alexa).

In today’s post I want to take a quick glimpse at the history of Yahoo! and how they’ve been a pioneer for all of us. Using an awesome tool called ‘Wayback Machine’ we can take a look back at Yahoo! and any other website since their creation. It’s an awesome tool. You can spend a lot of time playing around and watching how so many successful websites have changed over the years.

October 1996
This is the first capture of Yahoo we have. It looks like a general directory from the outside. They have thousands of websites already listed. They have a sports section and a stock section. The Dow was at 8,427…If only I would have got in back then! They have an awful looking header image that looks like it was made in paintbrush.

January 1997
The first thing I noticed was they moved to two columns in the center, instead of having one column left aligned. They also worked on the header. It now looks cleaner and appears to have buttons. At the top they also have looking for a job, date, car? Adding new features is a great way to keep visitors coming back. If you scroll to the bottom you can also see they added chat rooms. Chat rooms were the craze back in the late 90s.

February 1998
1998 looks almost the exact same as 1997. I don’t see any major changes during this time. They still have the search bar at the top and all the directory listings in the center. I did notice more links at the top for personals, weather and shopping.

January 1999
Once again, the home page still looks similar to the year prior. However, there are a couple new important features added. New features include Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Games. Adding Yahoo mail was probably the best thing Yahoo ever did to improve themselves and maintain dominance in the industry. I don’t know one person without a yahoo mail account, even if it is used for spam. Yahoo Mail crushed the competition. Anyone remember Rocketmail?

February 2000
Now we are finally seeing some changes on the Yahoo homepage. After three years of pretty much staying the same, they now moved to more of a portal feel. They added a green highlight box at the top of the directory, they added another column to the right side. They made the font larger for the directory categories. Another big feature I see added at the top center is Yahoo Messanger! Lots of big things happened in 2000 for Yahoo.

January 2001
This is the look and feel that I most recognize Yahoo with. Maybe because I first started playing Yahoo fantasy football in 2001, so I visited their site many, many times a day. They added a lot more links to the top center.

January 2002
The homepage still pretty much looks the same. No major changes that I can see.

January 2003
Finally seeing some color on the homepage. We are also seeing our first wave of advertisements. I see a Sierra Mist logo and a TD Waterhouse logo. Prior to this year, Yahoo didn’t have any ads on the homepage. I bet they saw a HUGE increase in annual revenues after adding advertisements. There are also a lot of organization changes. The site looks a lot cleaner and put together now. There are color differences for the divided sections. The header logo looks a lot cleaner and sharp.

January 2004
Looks very similar to 2003. I’m sure a lot of advancements were made on the backend and in the subpages, but the homepage looks very similar. They have the latest news displayed on the homepage and they are featuring Yahoo Autos! right in the center.

January 2005
For the first time we see less importance placed on the directory, and more importance placed on their other features. The directory listings on the homepage shrunk in size. It looks like here they are trying to be more of a news portal than a directory.

January 2006
More advertisements on the homepage. But everything else seems to be similar to 2005. Can you notice any major changes?

February 2007
Yahoo made the most changes to their homepage from 2006 to 2007. It looks completely different now. While all the information on the homepage is the same, they overhauled the look of it. You can now login to your mail account right there on the homepage. The made the search bar larger and more prominant. They added a left sidebar for the first time. Take a look at the header changes from 2006 to 2007. All those goofy logos are now gone and all they have is the Yahoo! logo. Rotating news is now featured right there in the front center. Another thing you might notice is ‘where’s the directory?’ in 2006 we saw the directory moved to the very bottom of the homepage, now it is completely gone.

Yahoo was founded as a directory, and today we don’t even see it on the homepage anymore. That’s what happens when websites evolve. Out with the old and in with the new I guess.

I know I didn’t provide as much details descriptions as I could have. I basically wanted you to see for your self how Yahoo has changed over the years. Take a look again at 1996 and then 2007. It’s hard to imagine how it could be so different.

If you know of any other websites that look a lot different from when they started, post a comment and I’d love to take a look.

The Kaplan University offers 70-526 as well as 70-547 if you have already done your 642-533. Also, with the former on your credit, you are exempted from 156-315 and are only required to sit in part of the exam for HP0-207.