View old versions of your photography website

Wanna take a nostalgic walk through your photography website history? There’s a way. It’s an Internet Archive called the Wayback Machine. I wanted to see if there was any record of my first website … And there is!

First stop: The search engine

Go to the Internet Archive. Once you are there plug in your Internet address. (I used bcphoto.vi and went back to 1996.) You’ll find a calendar which allows you to see your website at different times over the years. Then have some fun exploring older versions of your website. FYI they note that they have 793 billion — yes that’s billion with a capital B — webpages!

My Internet story

Started my photography business in March of 1995. In 1996 someone came to me with a proposal, “We want to use your images to help promote the Virgin Islands. If you let us use your photographs we’ll give you a website and email.”

My first question were, “What the heck is a website? What is email? And, WHY would I want them?” They did some explaining about this new technology and won me over. Turned out with some good results. Since there wasn’t a lot of content at that time, within three to four weeks of the website going live, I sold stock images to a company over in Norway. I also provided images and back story for a couple book projects over in the UK. That was just the beginning. Needless to say, I was sold on the idea of this “Internet Thing!” Things have sure come a long way since then.

A look back

I was curious to see how my images would hold up that I was using to promote my business back then. Surprisingly, I feel there are some strong images in there. I was a little appalled at the design and colors of the website. But remember, it was early days on the frontier of this place called the Internet!

Let me know

If you take a poke through some of your photography website history, share your stories with me. This was a fun look back through history. I’ve added some examples here, but if you want to look around in my first website go the Wayback Machine and put in bcphoto.vi.

Yours in Creative Photography, Bob