Your favourite brands haven’t always had the sleek, user-friendly interfaces you’re used to today.

Everyone must start from somewhere, even the likes of Amazon and McDonald’s.

Unfortunately, most of the resulting efforts were pretty terrible. There was no winning model to follow, so designers were left stabbing in the dark.

We used a combination of images from Educational consultants Essayroo and the Wayback Machine, which archives old websites, to dig up some of the most basic sites brands like Coca-Cola and Twitter had when they first launched.

Scroll down to laugh at their primitiveness, ordered by launch date.

An earlier version of this article was written by Will Heilpern.

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