A few days ago, one of my former colleagues liked a post on LinkedIn, from the University of York. They were celebrating their website being 30 years old, having launched in September 1997.
That would only be a few months after I discovered the joys of the World Wide Web and HTML myself, in July.
That, in turn, led the obvious question of when I launched the first website for Leeds Metropolitan University.
Once I’d picked up the CWIS (Campus-Wide Information Service) project, and two of my colleagues had suggested the World Wide Web “as it might be useful”, I developed a plan; then, accidentally, wrote a job description and got myself seconded from Computing Services to Communications and External Relations for a while.
That finished in August 1997, so sometime in that two-year period.
Ordinarily you’d go back to the Wayback Machine, but that only started in mid-1996, and the earliest lmu.ac.uk crawl was from 1997.
But: the webmaster came from Computing Services and had been a librarian, so he was a bit… nerdy, and a completist. The website was growing in stages, so a What’s New section had been added showcase the major highlights in new or revised content. Every six months that would be archived into a What Was New section.
And it is here that we discover the answer to the question.
What was new on 15 January 1996? All of it.
I don’t, of course, remember doing any of this, but I’m glad I did; and I’m glad it was still there when the Wayback Machine got round to looking at us.
The other striking thing is how similar our site as York’s were. Images, tables and any form of colour had only recently been added. The first pages I wrote in 1995 were black text on a grey background, blue for links, magenta for visited links. And that was it.
And, thus, entirely accessible. How times change.