As the 2016 presidential campaign heats up, Bernie Sanders has already run custom Snapchat ads promoting himself in Iowa. Ben Carson has been racking up Facebook fans. Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz have each cranked out original ads just for YouTube. And, of course, during the last two elections, President Barack Obama was widely praised for his use of data in driving voters to the polls while raising millions via social media.

Digital campaigning has come a long way over the past two decades. Back in 1996, President Bill Clintonand Republican senator Bob Dole created the first presidential websites (which have been archived by the Museum of the Moving Image). CMO Today caught up with some of the key players behind those early efforts.

Rob Kubasko, founder and creative director of digital design firm Iguana, Inc., was a student at Arizona State University when he and fellow student Vince Salvato were tapped to work on the Dole campaign’s website. The two men had helped put together the site for Super Bowl XXX, which was held in Tempe, Az in early 1996.

Mr. Kubasko: Working on that campaign was one of the funnier moments of life. It was absurd and ridiculous and spectacular. I was probably 22 or 23 when we got connected with the Dole campaign. I was part of a very small group of people who knew how to make a website and make it happen. A friend of mine, this guy at ASU, was this programmer Vince Salvato. We put together a proposal over the weekend and started our company.

Mr. Salvato: I know we had something up before the Clinton campaign because we had Dole96.org. We couldn’t get Dole.com because of Dole Pineapple. Once he picked his VP we switched to Dolekemp96.org.

There wasn’t much of a strategy. But the Dole site did feature an elaborate, highly detailed plan on restoring the American economy, complete with specific budget numbers, as well as pages where people could register to vote and make donations, along with a section labeled “Dole Interactive” offering “games, trivia, posters,and postcards.” According to Mr. Kubasko, the site even employed cookies, allowing some level of personalization.

Interactive features from Sen. Bob Dole's website in 1996 Photo: Museum of Moving Image

Mr. Kubasko: At that point if you didn’t have a website you were old and antiquated and Bob Dole didn’t need to seem any more antiquated than he was. But was there a plan? Nooo! Literally it was, “we need to have a website,and it needs to be better than Bill Clinton’s.” That was steps one and two. Step three was, maybe collect data. I wish we were more visionary about that.

There also wasn’t a “cloud” to lean on to support the site. And communications between the Web team and the Dole campaign were rather primitive.

Mr. Kubasko: We would do stuff on the website, we’d post it live. The campaign guys would print it out, annotate them and fax the changes back to me. I had 17 feet of faxes all over my dorm. It was so ridiculous. And I’d go through the edits.

Mr. Salvato: I lived with my parents and we turned my bedroom into our office. I was taking a full load at ASU, working on [the school’s] site, and then I’d get off work, and work on [the Dole site] all hours of the night and then repeat it the next day

Mr. Kubasko: I think in total they spent $40,000 to 45,000 on the entire thing, and we maybe pocketed two thirds. Our only expenses were this Sun Sparc Server that we had in my partners’s (Mr. Salvato’s) bedroom. We also had a T-1 [Internet connection] line. That was probably one of the first T-1 lines in Arizona. Dude, we had never seen Internet that fast before.

Marketing the site on the Web during a time prior to Google and Facebook was a non-factor.

Robert Arena, director of Internet strategy for the Dole campaign: We sent mousepads to people. They filled out a form on the site, which we manually processed. There was no automated system. Amazingly, we did get 15,000 volunteers and had a mailing list of 85,000. There was no digital advertising. I believe there was a discussion at some point.

Mr. Salvato: We see the Clinton site add something, and we’d say, “how can we beat that?” We’d try to come out with a new feature. It was definitely competitive.

Meanwhile, a small two-man digital agency from New York, Kaufman Patricof Enterprises, won the job to produce a website for President Clinton, who was running for reelection. Its co-founders were Mark Patricof, head of the investment bank Houlihan Lokey’s technology, media and telecommunications business, and Trevor Kaufman, who is now CEO of the digital media technology firm Piano.

Mr. Patricof: I was the deal guy and my partner Trevor was the HTML guy. We opened our doors in February and got hired in May….we made a lot of promises we couldn’t necessarily keep. But we were like young, smart, aggressive guys who knew the Internet and sold hard. We’d promise one thing and figure out how later.

Mr. Kaufman: We pitched the hell out of it. We stayed up all night and built the entire site as part of the pitch.

Believe it or not, the Clinton-Gore team had actually posted position papers to message boards on the Internet during the 1992 campaign, even though the campaign did not have a website.

Stu Trevelyan, chief executive at NGP VAN, which provides digital technology for Democratic campaigns, says he worked on a campaign website for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s 1994 campaign.

Mr. Trevelyan: Back then, you were literally wandering around talking to people within campaigns saying, ‘There’s this thing called the Internet.’

Jeff Eller, who runs a crisis management firm in Austin Texas, and worked in the Clinton White House as director of media affairs: There was no World Wide Web and no websites. But there were Compuserve forums. So we’d post what you now call content. Position statements and papers. People really wanted information, so we dabbled in it.

Kaufman Patricof Enterprises had a key meeting prior to the Clinton site launch with Vice President Al Gore.

Mr. Kaufman: Al Gore’s office was running this thing. He was the closest to it. And we had this meeting scheduled to present it to him. And we went to the White House, and the Internet went down. You think about [what it would be like if that were] happening now - but back then, it just wasn’t important to anybody at that point. The guy who’s our handler is too embarrassed to say anything to the vice president. And I’m mortified. I say, “I have some of the site I can show you on my laptop.” I’m thinking that we’d just completely screwed up. I’m an idiot. And he smiles, and says, “It looks great. That’s what you want me to say right?” He was great. After that we took some pictures.

(Al Gore’s office declined to comment for this story.)

Amazingly, the Clinton-Gore site didn’t even go live until July 1996, just four months before the election. The site featured sections touting the administration’s accomplishments in its first term, including the signing of a major anti-crime bill, an ahead-of-its-time Electoral College “computer” (which carried the message “In order to use the ‘computer’ you will need to install the current version of Shockwave.”) and an audio message from President Clinton, in which he says, “Let’s make 1997 NetYear.”

Mr. Patricof: This was new for everybody. With the resources we had we did very well. We took in donations. We were their first mouthpiece online.

Lynn Reed, who is an independent writer and producer and was the webmaster for the Clinton campaign’s site: I came in during the summer of 1996 when the site had already been set up and they realized they needed somebody to be in charge of it day-to-day. There was a debate at the time: Does this site belong with IT or communications? And they decided to put it in communications, which proved to be a good decision.

Stacie Spector, a communications professional in San Diego who was deputy communications director for Clinton-Gore: If you look at the campaign sites now, they are in real time. They are totally alive. It feels like you are in the campaign and hearing from the candidates. We were there to provide information. There were only so many bells and whistles you could do. We’d put caveats at bottom of our Web pages that would read, “If your computer is slowing, it means you don’t have the most updated [plugins].” Not everybody understood it.

An email from President Bill Clinton posted on his campaign website in 1996 Photo: Museum of Moving Image

Ms. Reed: We’d urge people to send in comments, and they’d go to this long text file on the server and we’d manually pull things out that were good. It was as rudimentary as you can imagine. People were still interacting through dial-up.

Sen. Dole threw his digital team for a loop when, near the close of the first presidential debate with President Clinton, he urged voters to visit his site. “If you really want to get involved,” he said, “just tap into my homepage, w-w-w-dot-Dole-Kemp-96-o-r-g.” Thankfully, by that point, the Dole Web team was no longer relying on a single server.

Sen. Dole promotes his 1996 website during a debate.

Mr. Kubasko: He didn’t tell us he was going to do that. The site implodes. If I remember correctly, we were getting 5,000 people at one time. Before that, you’re not getting more than a few hundred people at a time. It was so slow it was ridiculous. It was a huge deal.

Mr. Salvato: I remember watching the TV and just going “oh [bleep]!” Right away, I got a call from the hosting company and they said, ‘What do you want us to do?” and I was like, “Bring as many servers online as you can!”

Mr. Arena: The site was probably a little shaky for like 15 or 20 minutes. I didn’t know he was going to say it or who had encouraged him to say it. But raced my a-- back to the office.

The Clinton-Gore site had a similar scare following President Clinton’s win.

Mr. Patricof, who also helped build the a site for the inauguration in early 1997: I think it crashed on inauguration day.

Ms. Reed: We planned to do a live broadcast of the inauguration speech on the Internet. There wasn’t supposed to be a big audience. But the campaign liked the idea of being the first. And that morning, I got to my desk, and Yahoo had put a link to the live feed at the top of their site. It was completely unexpected. It crashed it.

Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com