some umanitoba.ca history

For those of you who haven’t noticed yet, the University today released its new homepage: umanitoba.ca. This is the 4th major revision of the University’s doorstep to the world.

What about versions 3, 2 and 1? Below you will find a little umanitoba.ca history to illustrate where we’ve come from (courtesy of archive.org). Most of the thumbnail images link to full-sized versions of the homepage of that era.

(All dates are approximate)

umanitoba.ca 1.0
16 June 1997 (and possibly earlier — this is the first date archived) – 25 May 1998

Welcome to the World Wide Web, and the bad old days. The University has yet to adopt its current logo, and things are pretty basic otherwise.

umanitoba.ca 2.0
25 May 1998 – 2 June 2002

The next major redesign of the U of M’s web presence involves a greater focus on “UMinfo”. It appears that the templates developed during this period paved the way for the first attempt at unification of the University’s many web pages.

umanitoba.ca 3.0
2 June 2002 – 11 April 2005

This was the design that brought us the UManitoba we knew and loved (mostly) until today. Focused around the “At the centre of it all” campaign, it featured a new look and feel that was fairly functional and content-oriented. It also featured a main image, at the centre of the page, highlighting the interesting people and things currently going on at the U of M.

In mid-2003, the right sidebar was updated to contain the bisoncam among other things. This appears to be the last major modification before the 2005 redesign.

2 Responses to “some umanitoba.ca history”

  1. Dana Gregoire Says:

    Nice research. Boy, that first one was baaaaaaad….

  2. Joey Coleman Says:

    Dana,

    It was not actually too bad for the time. It fits very well with what sites looked like during that time period…. lets just call it the sideburns period of the Internet.