Some time ago I was working on a lecture about the importance of unique value proposition in UX design process. One of the hints I wanted to give my students was that in many cases older (or first) versions of big brands’ UVPs can be better benchmarks than those that these companies are using today.

In many cases: the older the brand, the more its UVP is being replaced by a slogan.

And since I wanted to illustrate this process with an example, I thought — hm, let’s see what the first MailChimp’s UVP was, and if it changed much. So I went to Web Archive to look for some old version of MailChimp website and a few minutes later… I got sucked into this research completely.

Not to mention the feeling of nostalgia.

I jotted down a short list of websites that are popular today and then started taking screenshots of their predecessors. For some reason these companies succeeded, and perhaps it was their well-built websites what helped them with it. I believe there’s a lot that business owners, product-, UX-, visual designers, copywriters etc. could learn from studying the past.

My short list soon became the list so I thought I could share the results of this research. Hence this post.

So here they are, ordered A — Z. Sit back, relax, turn your clock back and enjoy.

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