Twenty years ago today, Wired launched a seminal redesign of its website that helped catapult forward web technology and what our industry understood as possible for commercial websites.

A few years back, I added the redesign date to my calendar to help mark the passing of time. Each year, just as baseball’s Postseason ignites in early October, I get a reminder that takes me back to the early days of the web, even before the dot-com craze. It was a different era, marked by experimentation, exploration, and curiosity. continued

Ten years ago today, we pulled back the curtains on a redesign of Wired.com. The actual design and the code that rendered it are long gone. But they were significant in their time.

The redesign of Wired News in 2002 marked the first time a large, well-known, daily-content publisher had dropped tables for layout, and embraced the separation of markup and style in a rather new (at the time) approach to web design. Several prominent blogs, and niche content sites (zeldman.com, meyerweb.com, alistapart.com) had broken ground, and were already using and evangelizing a greater adoption of Web Standards.

continued