After Hours · Since ’96
My Website, Redesigned Every Year Since I Was Born
I rebuilt my homepage the way it would have been built every year since 1996, the year I was born.
I was born in 1996. That year most people met the web through Netscape Navigator, on a 640 by 480 screen, over a 28.8k modem that tied up the phone line. I’ve been building websites since 2018, and I got curious what my own homepage would have looked like if I’d been making it the whole time.
So I rebuilt it for every year from 1996 to 2026. That’s 31 versions, each one running inside the browser people used that year, from Netscape 3 on Windows 95 to Safari on an iPhone. Each one is also written the way it would have been written then: uppercase FONT tags and spacer GIFs in 1996, a frameset in 1997, a Flash movie in 1999, Dreamweaver slices in 2002, CSS floats in 2004 and so on, up to the CSS we have now. It lives on my After Hours page as Since ’96, and the scrubber at the top of this post runs through all of it.
Here’s the history of web design as it played out on one homepage, era by era.