I Found a Website I Built in the 1990s
Every web developer has a few projects that disappear into history.
Or so we think.
While digging through old internet archives recently, I stumbled across a website I built in the late 1990s for Ellensburg Telephone Company — known locally back then as Ell Tel — in Ellensburg, Washington.
Seeing it again was like opening a time capsule from the early days of the commercial web.
And honestly? It brought back a lot of memories.
Where I was building websites in the 1990s
My web design career goes back to around 1995. I was living in Roslyn, WA and building websites out of my parents’ real estate office on the corner of 1st and Oakes in Cle Elum. The Ellensburg Telephone project came a few years into that — closer to 1998 or 1999.
It was one of the first websites I remember being genuinely proud of.
At the time, Ellensburg Telephone was doing something ambitious: they weren’t just a phone company anymore. They were launching internet service. “EllTel Internet — It’s Here!” was the headline on the homepage.
That was a big deal in the late 1990s.
The internet was a different place
Today we take responsive layouts, fast hosting, and content management systems for granted.
Back then, things were a little different.
Most visitors were connecting through dial-up modems. Screen resolutions of 800×600 pixels were standard. CSS support was limited, and most websites were built with HTML tables, image maps, and a lot of creativity.
When every kilobyte mattered, you had to be clever about design.
What was on the homepage
The archived homepage has colorful navigation graphics surrounding the Ellensburg Telephone logo in the center. Each colored blob was a clickable destination:
- Customer Service
- Products & Services Catalog
- Directory Search
- Community Information
- Current Ellensburg Weather (fed from the Ellensburg School District’s weather station)
- Guestbook
- Company Info
- Join Our Team
And at the bottom, a long-distance service ad with one of my favorite taglines of that era: “We won’t call you during dinner — ever!”
The feature nobody else had
That Directory Search in the far left of the homepage? It wasn’t a site index or a staff directory.
It was a reverse phone number lookup.
You could type in a phone number and the site would tell you who it belonged to.
That sounds ordinary today. In the late 1990s, it wasn’t.
Reverse lookups existed — but they lived behind paid subscriptions, 1-800 directory assistance lines, or specialized services you accessed through BBS systems, Telnet, AOL, or CompuServe. You didn’t just open a browser and search for free.
Ellensburg Telephone had that subscriber data. Building a browser-based interface that let anyone search it — for free, publicly, with no account required — took real database work, real server infrastructure, and a lot of code that most web shops at the time wouldn’t have attempted.
That took two things: a phone company willing to open their subscriber data to the public web, and a web developer who could actually build the search interface to make it work. Ellensburg Telephone had the vision. I had the skills to execute it. I’m proud we pulled that off.
The “portal” approach
Something younger web developers might not recognize is the homepage style itself.
Instead of long scrolling pages, many websites in the late 1990s functioned more like visual maps. The homepage was a launching pad — a collection of destinations, not a sales funnel.
The goal wasn’t to keep visitors scrolling.
The goal was to help them find what they needed as quickly as possible.
That’s actually not a bad instinct. It just looks different now.
The visual style is a different conversation. Those glowing gradients and colorful graphic blobs were the design vocabulary of the era — nobody thought twice about them. Today we understand how much visual noise gets in the way of the actual message. Back then, that was the message.
The Y2K timestamp
One detail on the page stopped me cold: a link labeled “Year 2000 Info.”
If you weren’t online during that era, Y2K was a very real concern. Businesses, utilities, and telecommunications companies spent years preparing for potential software failures when the calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000.
For Ellensburg Telephone — an infrastructure company — that wasn’t optional prep work. It was a customer communication priority.
That link sitting on the homepage dates the site more precisely than any file timestamp ever could.
More than a phone company
What this site really shows is a company in transition.
In the late 1990s, local telephone companies were becoming internet service providers, email hosts, long-distance carriers, and community information hubs — all at the same time.
The web was becoming the front door to all of those services.
You can see that transformation happening in real time on this homepage. The internet service banner. The community weather feed. The directory search. The long-distance ad.
They were trying to be everything their customers needed online — and doing it before most businesses even had a website.
What I notice now
Looking at it today as someone who’s been doing this for 30 years, there’s a lot I’d build differently.
But that’s not really the point.
What I see is a website that solved the problems its visitors actually had at the time.
It loaded quickly over slow connections. It organized important information. It gave a regional phone company a real presence on a rapidly growing internet.
That’s what good web design has always been about.
Not chasing trends. Solving problems.
The tools change. The mission doesn’t.
Finding this archived site reminded me how fast technology moves.
The platforms and practices I use today — WordPress, modern hosting, structured data, local SEO — look nothing like HTML tables and image maps.
But the people coming to a website in Ellensburg in the late 1990s wanted the same things people want today. They had a question. They needed an answer. They wanted to reach someone they could trust.
Back then we delivered that experience with animated GIFs and image maps over dial-up connections.
Today I build WordPress sites optimized for speed. Local SEO puts them in front of the right people at the right time — something that wasn’t even a concept when that Ellensburg Telephone homepage was live.
The mission is exactly the same.
And I’m still doing it in the same market — web design for Ellensburg businesses — just without the dial-up connection and the colored navigation blobs.
Need a website for your Ellensburg business?
I’ve been building websites for Ellensburg businesses since before Y2K was a concern. If you’re looking for a web designer in Ellensburg who actually knows the market, give me a call: (425) 243-7239.
Free consultation. No obligation. No dinner-time phone calls — ever.