W3C Website Redesign and Its Designs over the years

W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. It’s also famous for the W3C Markup Validation Service, which check HTML/XHTML & CSS for any mark-up errors. W3C is so important to the Internet, it gets 10/10 Google Pagerank.

Since its formation in October 1994, W3C has redesigned its website a few times and the most recent  redesign was in October this year. Let’s take a look the designs over the years of one of the most important website – w3.org.

You can jump right to the screenshot:

• April 1997
• February 1998
• March 2000
• December 2000
• February 2003
• The latest redesign in October 2009

W3C Website Screenshot in April 1997. Earliest website for W3C.  Basically a simply page with Logo Heading and  a small list and an email address for webmaster…

W3C Website Screenshot in February 1998. This is when W3C issued HTML 4.0 as a recommendation. This website build with tables,  a few inline css, and it also introduced sidebar.

W3C Website Screenshot in March 2000. Built withtables and an external style sheet. A lot of texts were add to the page.  As an result, the page looks very busy.

W3C Website Screenshot in December 2000. Introduction of the three column layout. It also used background colors to create visual interests.

W3C Website Screenshot in February 2003. Tableless three column layout built with css. The color scheme gets an update, it’s easier on your eyes. This design is used until Oct. this year when it seems dated.

W3C Website Screenshot in December 2009. This is the latest redesign for W3C. It’s much more cleaner and fresher. It kept it tradition of using liquid layouts and updated a new color scheme. Let’s take a close look a some of its details.

Letterpress text effect is used on its logo. Also combing some drop shadows effect, it creates more depths.

More drop shadows and 3d elements and text-shadows.

Highlights and shadows. It now offers styles for desktop, mobile, and also for print.

The new design uses footer for navigation and links.  It makes the site feel current.

W3C’s New site is designed by Happy Cog.
All the old W3C screenshots are found at Internet Archive
Check out the W3C’s new design