A Brief History of MGPL’s Websites

Chad Comello staff photo

October 04, 2019

By Chad Comello

Categories: Library News, Spotlight

Now that the new Library website is live, I thought it would be fun to explore previous versions of the Library’s homepage from years past. Thanks to our internal records and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which takes live snapshots of websites over time, we’re able to not only see what our previous websites looked like but also poke around them a little bit.

 

1995-1998

Did you know our website used to be Webrary.org? We loved that term so much that we got an official registered trademark for it, though it has since expired. We have no known record of what this site looked like, but it was likely just a list of links selected by our Reference staff.

 

1998-2001

Available on the Internet Archive here. This was the first version to use Webrary for the name of the entire site rather than for a list of links. And it was very… orange:

1998 Website screenshot

 

2001-2005

Available on the Internet Archive here. Going green this time, the graphics were done by the same designer who did the previous version:

2001 Website screenshot

 

2005-2012

Available on the Internet Archive here. This second green version was like the previous one, with only a new homepage:

2005 website screenshot

 

2012-2019

Available on the Internet Archive here. Our first site to be designed and hosted by an outside company, this was when we said farewell to Webrary and switched to MGPL.org:

2012-2019 website screenshot

 

2019-

Now live at MGPL.org. It’s our first mobile-responsive site, with a new integrated events calendar and lots of other useful features. Let us know what you think!

homepage screenshot

Chad Comello is the Marketing & Engagement Coordinator at the Morton Grove Public Library.