Disney Does Web Right From The Start

Disney, a world-renowned symbol of happiness and childhood, has had an online presence for almost two decades at http://www.disney.com. The changes in Disney’s website from 1996 to today reflect both the improvement in technology (particularly software developments) and the changes the company has gone through from the 90’s up until today.

Disney is a highly successful company throughout the globe, and their early online presence reflects this. 1996 was a time when the World Wide Web was still new to the general public. Disney had asserted their online presence in the midst of other companies still trying to figure out what it meant for a business to be online. Here is a basic webpage that Disney had in December 1996.

Disney had a plain website with appropriate Disney images and many hyperlinks showing multiple options to engage with Disney online. In 1997, we see Disney’s website layout change, likely for aesthetic purposes (as it does not seem easier to navigate than the 1996 website!). The 1997 disney.com offers much of the same online interactivity that the 1996 website did.

In late July 1998, we see Disney improve their website’s digital abilities through functions such as their animation of the text “For The ULTIMATE Family Web Directory Click Here & Dig In”. By 1998, online activity was becoming common throughout the world. As opposed to their earlier years where Disney’s website had been geared towards being informative rather than entertaining, Disney chose to position themselves as a good website for children to begin their Internet use with. This can be seen through numerous options such as “Give Your Kids a Trusted Online Service“, “Disney’s Internet Guide, The Ultimate Family Web Directory”, and “Blast for Kids, Read with Mulan & Friends!” presented on the disney.com homepage.

1998 to 2001 is where we see the biggest leap in Disney.com’s visuals. By 2001, Disney had firmly established themselves as an interactive website that was safe, fun and easy for kids to use. In 2001 I was a six-year-old and I was completely taken back to my childhood upon seeing this Disney.com webpage. I vividly remember Disney’s website like this and Disney.com was probably the website I used most often at the time. At the ages of six and seven years old, I was navigating the Disney website, playing games, printing out coloring pages, and interacting with Disney’s other online activities without parental -or other adult- assistance. The visuals and animation of their website was definitely advanced at the time, your mouse even turned into a Mickey Mouse hand when you were on their site. Every page on Disney.com was highly animated and graphics-based.

From 2002 to 2006, Disney’s website maintained a similar Disney-park-like look and offered many of the same functions for many years. Disney is known for their multiple Disneylands across the globe, including the Hong Kong Disneyland that was opened in 2005, while Disney.com was using their park-like theme.

In 2007, the website’s design was completely changed from their park theme, leading the website to look and offer content that is a lot more similar to today’s Disney website.

By 2012, the website was playing trailers and videos on their website’s homepage, and the website would vary from week to week depending on Disney’s new TV shows and Movie releases. Promotions and Disney Celebrations were also sometimes highlighted. Here’s an example from January 2012, where Disney had a new Beauty and the Beast 3D film.

Finally, we reach today’s Disney website. The clean layout is aesthetically pleasing to the modern computer-user. Disney.com rotates through different Disney advertisements on their homepage and the site still offers all the disney.com uses and functions that it has for years.

Disney made the biggest changes to their website in their early years, where they went from being a simple informative website to a highly animated engaging website for children’s use. Though Disney.com does now have more online games for children than ever before, the Disney website overall seems to have gradually reverted back to their primarily adult target. The website always maintained seamless animation, right from their basic use of it in 1998. A lot of information and entertainment is available at Disney.com, and this has been the case since they first launched their website.

All screenshots in this post were taken using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. https://archive.org/web/