Back in the early days of the Internet, before political parties were sending you dozens of ‘tweets’ on Twitter, begging you to join their Facebook group or subscribe to their blog feed the net was populated by computer savvy geeks, nerds and technophiles.
Thanks to the Internet Archive we have the ability to see just how bad things were in those early days of the web. All in all it was a pretty sorry state of affairs, with all three of the main parties putting little though into the design, usability or functionality of their websites.
Not knowing how to leverage this new medium, the big political parties put little thought, or effort into their brand new websites. And as a result they ended up with stale and underutilized communications channels at best, and at worst a collection of badly designed, sorry looking pages.
How quickly things have changed, now the web is an integral part of the communications strategies for all the political parties, large or small. The web has turned out to be the great leveller, allowing smaller, less well funded parties to reach a proportionally larger audience - you just have to look at how the Greens used the web in their local and mayoral campaign to see how effective it can be.
Labour Party homepage from 1996
Conservative Party homepage from 2000
Liberal Democrats homepage from 1996
UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter on Dizzy Thinks I can now add the Conservative homepage from 1996. The reason I didn’t find this version in the Internet Archive is because they used to use the conservative-party.org.uk domain name, which I didn’t check. Thanks dynamite.
Conservative Party homepage from 1996
May 28th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Note John Major’s mistaken belief that “it was not the State that created the Internet” - oh no? Did the internet come from somewhere other than ARPAnet, created by the US Department of Defense?
May 28th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Indeed David, but you can’t expect the Prime Minister of the time to know anything about ARPAnet now can you? Maybe he was preoccupied with Edwina Currie when he got the briefing about this new thing called the internet.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:21 am
So much beige…you’d think it was the 70s rather than the mid-90s.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:12 am
No, the internet is a UK invention that the americans copied and then linked to us.
Frontpage backgrounds are a US invention that we unfortunatley copied for a while!
May 29th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
That’s quite a “late” version of the Labour Party’s web pages - about three years after they started. I think the first address was something like http://www.poptel.net/labourparty or similar.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Well, actually, Adrian, Paddy Ashdown invented the internet in 1971, and the green party began their site to campaign for the repeal of the corn laws…