We all learn from what other companies do, especially those that repeatedly test copy, design, offers and the like. It’s easy to track the evolution of other companies’ catalogs or magazine ads, but not so easy to follow changes in their web sites. Not so easy, that is, until the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is a free tool available from the Internet Archive which lets users view old versions of web sites. While not every web site is included, more than 150,000,000,000 pages are archived – substantially more material than is housed in the Library of Congress.
To access the Wayback Machine, go to http://www.archive.org/ and enter a URL. For web sites that are included, a list of dates appears, each with a link to how the web site appeared at the time.
