What Toronto-based newspaper websites looked like a decade ago

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Here's a fun way to waste a few minutes. Go to the Wayback Machine Internet Archive and pop in a few of the major websites that you visit on a regular basis. The results should lead to a bit of nostalgia and certainly a smile or two. For me, the archive searches that are the most fun involve those sites that have 1.) been around for a long time (obviously) and 2.) undergone radical change over the duration of their existence. Needless to say, Toronto-based newspapers certainly fit this bill.

I'm by no means a web designer, but it's not hard to tell that there's been a significant evolution in the way that the mainstream media displays news. Along with the heavy reliance on the left sidebar, in the past images were either small or non-existent, and the layouts just looked painfully boring. But that's not really a criticism so much as an observation of how much things have changed -- and for the better. I may not be a fan of the current designs of all Toronto-based news sites, but to say that they've improved over the years would be an enormous understatement.

Here's a quick glimpse back into a past when newspapers didn't really have to worry about the web so much. If it proves interesting, I'll grab a few more captures from various redesigns to show how they progressed over the years (though the Globe recently did this for their publication after their last redesign).

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