Later this year we come up to the 27th birthday of the internet being publicly available, all thanks to Tim Berners-Lee. As we recently travelled through time on Andy’s 50th we thought we’d have a look at how one of the world’s biggest website’s has changed.
Whilst it was in 1991 the public first got their hands on the internet it wasn’t until 1998 the most well known website in the world google.com was born, changing the way we all used the internet.
The basic design of the google.com homepage hasn’t changed much over the years but there is one thing you may find unusual. The original Google logo actually had an exclamation point at the end. It also contained an email sign up for monthly updates.
This was short lived and in 2000 they came out with a new homepage design. They updated the logo & removed the email sign up & unnecessary links to make it much cleaner and simpler.
Let’s jump 15 years into the future, where we see another new logo which has followed modern design trends and gone flat and an even more refined homepage. The buttons have been updated to a much more subtle grey, making them less garish. At this point in time they also had services such as Google Plus, Gmail & image search, you can see these options a long the top of the page.
Finally, 2017. To us this is the most dramatic change Google have had. A font change for the logo, they’ve gone from a serif font to a blocky san-serif font. You can see in the bar at the top they’ve removed the reference to Google Plus and simple have a sign in option now allowing you to access all of Google’s services such as Google Plus, YouTube and more. They kept Gmail and Image as their own separate tabs as these are some of the most common / popular sections of the site.
Google have spent the past 19 years refining and perfecting their homepage design, adding additional features that we use on a day to day basis. It is also by far one of the most important things to consider when building a website, as no matter who you are or what business you run you want to be on the first page when it comes to search terms.