- What has changed from what you would see on a modern page today?
Compared to modern university websites, 1990s pages feel much more like simple information directories than polished “experience” platforms. The layout is typically text-heavy, with basic navigation, few images, and lots of straightforward lists of links rather than large banners, video, interactive tiles, or personalized portals. Pages are often organized like digital pamphlets or newsletters rather than tightly integrated sites with consistent branding and design systems. You also see communication details that have mostly disappeared from today’s student-facing web presence, like fax numbers listed alongside phone and email.
- What’s the same?
Even with the older design, the core job of a university website hasn’t really changed: it’s still a public gateway to programs, departments, services, events, and official information. Then and now, universities use their sites to connect different audiences to the parts of the institution they need. You can still recognize familiar priorities like promoting campus identity, announcing events, highlighting community activities, and providing ways to contact offices or people responsible for specific initiatives.
- What can we learn about this as a primary source about what life was like in the 1990s?
As primary sources, these pages show what universities considered important to publish online during the late 1990s and how “being on the web” was understood at the time. The structure suggests that the internet was often treated as a place to post organized information rather than a highly interactive environment, which fits a period when just getting reliable content online was a big step. Pages that resemble newsletter content also tell us something about campus culture and outreach, especially to alumni, since they document events, community networks, and the way institutions tried to keep people connected before social media normalized constant updates and two-way engagement.
- What can we not learn? What do we need to be careful about thinking about?
We have to be careful not to treat an archived university webpage as a complete picture of what life was like for students or staff in the 1990s, because it mostly reflects an institutional voice and a curated public image. Furthermore, because the web was used differently back then, we cannot make extrapolations based on the difference between the university’s website now and the website back then. For example, just the website doesn’t automatically tell us how widely the site was used, or who even had easy access to the web at the time. To avoid overgeneralizing about something as broad as “what was life like in the 1990s”, it helps to read these pages alongside other sources so that we can compare the official online presentation with the lived experience and the broader media environment of the decade.