The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20161219233253/http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-wsjlookback06.html

EVOLUTION OF WSJ.COM

The changing look of The Wall Street Journal Online, from early concepts to the site's more recent facelifts.
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Planning for The Wall Street Journal Online began before the World Wide Web burst onto the scene. Software for the service was to be distributed on disks and users would dial in to retrieve updates. This early prototype was developed by Neil Budde, who championed the new service. Plans for a dialup service would continue until January 1995, when plans shifted to an Internet service.
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Money & Investing Update was the Journal's first full news Web site. It launched on July 11, 1995, and concentrated primarily on markets news. A running commentary on the financial markets appeared on the home page beside the familiar listing of What's News. A simple company research section, known as Briefing Books, was added in September 1995.
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The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition was the first full Online Journal site, launched on April 29, 1996. The main navigation of the site continued to mirror the newspaper; plus, Sports and Personal Journal. The latter referred to personalization features -- not the now-familiar section of the print and online Journals that cover "business of life" issues.
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The top of the home page -- in particular the banner that contained the Interactive Edition nameplate -- was frequently tweaked to give more prominence to features such as the Portfolio tool and Stock Quotes. Photos were used on the front page, at times, to illustrate the biggest World-Wide stories.
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Tech Center was broken out as a standalone section in September 1997 and a section of feature coverage, called Marketplace Extra, was introduced (see link to the latter at the top of the right column). A continually updating display of the Dow Jones Industrial Average was introduced at the top right of the page.
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For many years, WSJ.com offered little information on its home page for nonsubscribers. Today, nonsubscribers can read summaries of the biggest news of the day. In this version of the "nonsubscriber" home page, only a handful of headlines are available for free.
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Space was tight at the top of the home page in the Interactive Edition's early designs, making it difficult to prominently display online-exclusive features aside from breaking news. The width of the page was expanded in this design to create a "fourth column" to feature more material. At the top of the column, readers could hit buttons that would expand to reveal search boxes.
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The site was renamed The Wall Street Journal Online in February 2000. In this shot of the new design, a box of automatically updating market indexes had been added at the top of the page as well as the first "Inside Today" box was added to highlight online exclusives. Question of the Day here appears in a new-generation box in the fourth column called "Also Inside."
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The Wall Street Journal Online's first comprehensive redesign was launched on Jan. 28, 2002. Inside Today took a more prominent position at the top of the page and much of the left column is devoted to personalized news. Major sections called Your Money and At Leisure are introduced and the Opinion section is given more prominence in the site navigation.
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The Inside Today box is improved shortly after the redesign is launched to give even more prominence to online exclusives, such as columnists and interactive graphics.
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This tweak to the design was launched in March 2005, again devoting more space and giving more promience to online exclusives. In addition, "bulleted" headlines run with many summaries in the What's News column to provide links to extra stories and features keyed to the biggest news each day. The Personal Journal section, added in November 2003, appears in the site's side navigation.
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The latest home-page redesign, launched in March, increases the width of the page and adds more navigation to inside pages at the top of the page. Personalization now takes up less space on the front page, yet readers can watch more companies, industries, columnists and topics.