How the Washington & Jefferson College Website Changed Since 1997

I was amazed at how simple and plain the Washington & Jefferson College website was when it was first created in 1997. First of all, isn’t that a bit late in the “Internet boom” for a website to start up? I suppose W&J has always been a little old fashioned.

Despite being plain, at least the title of “Washington & Jefferson College” was read, which reflects what is now our school colors (black and red).

By 2000, you start to see some structure and links to information. Our school logo was in use in 2000, which is surprising to me given how freely UNCC has changed their logos over time. But, like I mentioned before, W&J has always been old fashioned and nostalgic.

I jumped ahead six years and found a very familiar-looking website! Finally, some normalcy that I can relate to! The background is read in 2006, which must mean that the people developing the website were doing more fancy tricks and such. The accents were black. And of course, out logo of Old Main is prominent.

In 2011, my last year at W&J, the red background faded to white and the body of the website was gray. Since I’ve been gone, I suppose the folks in IT got creative. I checked what the website looked like today (August 29, 2012) and the red background is gone! The traditional lettering of the logo was also gone! It’s replaces with calligraphy lettering with the school crest in the background. There is a lot more gray with red lettering.

I would say overall that the change has been significant and dramatic. The inclusion of color and more complicated links by the 2000s only took a few years to achieve. Since then, the site became more and more elaborate with shifting pictures of activities on campus, more news and events are listed, and far more detail has been put into the links, labels, photos, graphics, backgrounds, and even the logo!

If you would like to see for yourself, here is a link to the WayBack. Don’t worry, I already plugged in W&J’s website for you!

http://wayback.archive.org/web/19970701000000*/http://www.washjeff.edu/

Enjoy!