Well it's nearly upon us. We knew it was coming, but here it is. On 31st October this year Chameleon will be 10 years old, and we're embarking on a whole bunch of fun to celebrate over the coming weeks. (Not least by behaving like 10 year olds on our temporarily kid-like blog )

A decade is a lot of time in anyone's book. Particularly in the life of a web agency. When we were established Vicky wanted us to be a one stop shop for all things web, a bold move back then, but the right one of course. Even so, who knew it would work out so well?!

Seriously... In '98 the web was a different kettle of fish to what we see today. To kick of our 10th anniversary blogging, I thought I'd have a quick look at the web world circa 1998...

When we started up, Google looked like this...

...and really was still in Beta Google is also 10 this year, so we're in good company. You can check out the last ten years of the world's favourite search engine at: http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday/

An early client of Chameleon's were these cheeky chaps, with an ambitious website also founded in 1998:

A concept probably before it's time, sadly, and a story that didn't end too happily for well-publicised reasons - fortunately nothing to do with us, and we got paid too, which I don't think can be said of all their creditors!

I didn't realise until today that usability guru Jakob Nielsen archives his popular Alertbox commentary online (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/). Well worth a browse for insightful titbits and the odd amusing misfire prediction (nobody's perfect!).

On 1st Nov 1998, a day after our founding (no doubt a busy and disorienting day in Harrow), Jakob writes about Yahoo:

"Yahoo's home page has an average download time of 3.0 seconds according to the Keynote performance index. This is one of the fastest download times among major websites. " Bang, zoom!

He also notes that "since Internet bandwidth is very limited, Yahoo emphasizes a slim design and forgets about emulating television or glossy magazines." We were all on piddling 56k modems at the time don't forget, so the thumbs up from Jakob for Yahoo.

He does argue however that "Advertising Doesn't Work on the Web" and that "Yahoo's financial reports show that Web advertising is a very poor revenue generator". Hm... not so sure that prediction panned out all that well.

Old screenshots are fun, so here's a Yahoo one:

Look familiar? I expect so, because Yahoo looked more or less like this until about 2004.

A final bit from the Nielsen archives, just since it shows how things have changed. On 29th Nov 98 he advises that web pages should be left online indefinitely because "search engines are slow in updating their databases". Word, Jakob. Chameleonnet.co.uk has received 3,154 hits from search spiders so far this week alone.

Things have moved on. We all know that, but it's a bit dizzying sometimes to think just how rapidly the web has evolved. Chameleon started in a climate of snail's pace modems, search engines that spider and index every other week at about teatime, adventurous but ill conceived web-only startups, and the beginnings of a world dominating brain child of two adventurous geeks in California (sorry Larry/Sergey).

Exciting and turbulent times were ahead. I'll do a bit more digging and pick another exciting year in the life of Chameleon for one of my next posts, so watch out web lovers.