Back to the Future - Volute's first ever website from 1999!

Find out more about Volute's first ever website back in the last millenium - and take a visit to look around the vintage website we dug out of cold storage.

We were recently asked what was our oldest website. This got us wondering if we could track down any of the early designs.

Going through our archives we discovered some archives on Compact Disc. Having managed to locate an old CD reader, we rediscovered a backup of our very first website for the Victoria Shopping Centre in Nottingham.

Initially designed in 1999 and first launched in early 2000, it was Volute’s first commercial foray into web development. Everything was hand-coded using text editors and images made using early versions of Adobe Photoshop.

You can tell from the size of the images shown on this page just how small computer screens were at the turn of the millennium. In addition you need to know that there was no such thing as broadband Internet and all connections needed to be made by dial-up modem. This was very slow and so images needed to be small enough to allow the page to load in a reasonable timeframe.

The website won an award for best use of new media presented by the British Council of Shopping Centres in 2000. You can see from the picture, we had four year-old Alex Ryan, son of Volute founder Tim to be our model for the accompanying  press release. 26 years later Alex is a senior developer at the Volute,  building websites and learning management systems for organisations around the country.

Now that we have dug the old Victoria Centre website out of cold storage, it’s your chance to discover/remember (delete according to your age!) at what life was like on the Internet in the year 2000.

For those of you familiar Nottingham at that time you can take a look at all the shops that were in the Victoria Centre. How many can you remember?