After Tim Cook addressed The Wall Street Journal’s bad reporting on Apple’s cut on component orders for the iPhone 5, the quarterly numbers for 2013 were announced. As everyone expected, they were mind bogglingly good. As we have reported here on Bit Rebels before, Apple is in no way struggling to make profit off of their own ingenuity. But how is it that they continue their success year after year? Maybe the answer can be found in Apple’s website history.
Throughout the past 15 years, Apple has had a pretty prominent and continuous design trend on their website. It helps customers navigate and find products without any problems and without feeling alienated by new designs and complicated navigational attributes. There have been a great many number of websites that have enjoyed success only to ruin it all with bad web design when they try to renew themselves. But when it comes to Apple, their website history is as solid as the company itself for the past decade or so.
It’s to no one’s surprise that Apple has managed to create a well designed and eye catching website. After all, their design history has always been to the highest standard. Microsoft has somewhat started to follow the same pattern, but Apple has a long website history to prove their success.
Recently Charlie Hoehn decided to take a closer look at Apple’s website history and used Internet Archive Wayback Machine to check just how much of Apple’s website history had been affected by new designs and product announcements. The result became a pretty awesome 141 image slideshow that will take you through Apple’s 15 year website history in a jiffy.
So what can we learn from this? Well, what we can derive from their successful website history is that small changes and subtle rearrangements are preferred by visitors. A complete redesign has always thrown people off. If someone has grown fond of a website, they have done so based on content and familiarity. If you change the familiarity, the way they perceive your content will be altered as well. This is something for every website owner, founder or designer to think about. Have a look at Apple’s website history to get some 15 years worth of proof for why familiar design is so important for a website to gain a large and loyal following.
Charlie Hoehn’s 15 Year Apple Website History Compilation
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