Nathan Nov 2, 2009

Sure, it’s very interesting to see how the visual design has updated through the years.

However, to me, the most revealing aspect of these screenshots is the persistence of paths and primary navigation categories. It’s downright AMAZING that the primary navigation categories in 1996 - 13 years ago - are EXACTLY the same as the global navigation options today. Did Cisco just get it back at the beginning? Perhaps, to a point. Or is there just so much inertia in those categories (and the consensus / agreement all teams have made to settle on those) that they’ve just not budged since?

Darnals Nov 5, 2009

im sure its working but if using free domain like mine its not usefull

but its so good to get the last data

Best Regrats
Darnals

Martin Hardee Nov 7, 2009

Nathan has a really interesting point about how the main structure of the site has stayed so stable for so long.

I think both of the reasons he posits are correct. First, these really are good and timeliness categories, and many technology sites have the same kinds of sections.  Most of the business technology sites in the 1990s started by asking their customers how they wanted to navigate, and patterned the categories off what the customers told them (and these categories map to that customer’s view of organization at sites like IBM, HP, Sun, Cisco, and others.) HP has made the biggest change, with a more task-oriented navigation on the home page, but at the lower levels their site still harkens back to the traditional categories.

The one exception to this customer-oriented rule is the “Solutions” sections of the sites. “Solutions,” as a label, tends to be championed more by the marketing departments than by customers… solutions areas certainly get a good share of traffic, but not nearly as much as products area.  The paradox here is that many customers who go into the products area on a tech web site may actually need a system or solution… but customers think of assessing and buying products, not something called “solutions.”

Nathan’s other point about there being an inertia that fights massive changes to navigation is also true, of course.

Cutter Nick’s question about the age of the wayback machine: The wayback machine is younger than the web, so it didn’t capture the first pages of the pioneer sites such as Cisco.com.