20 Years Ago on AOL.com: May 27, 1999 -- Double the Daily Essentials, plus Autos and AOL Hometown

May 27, 1999: Yesterday I somehow failed to notice the other fairly major (to me) change to the page: In the main promo block, we expanded Daily Essentials to two columns, adding static promos for more of our top performers and sacrificing the two longer text promos in the process. They never performed well enough to justify the effort. I'm not sure what I did with the time saved.

Oh, main promo was for new and used car pricing; I think the car is a Mazda:

For the PM update, we went with our standard purple-and-yellow AOL Hometown promo. Also, the My News headline references the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, STS-96:

[Series note: In the late 1990s, I programmed the content for the AOL.com home page, which relaunched with a new design on July 14, 1998. I printed screencaps and saved them. 20 years later, I'm scanning them in and posting them with a little commentary under the tag #20YearsAgoOnAOLcom.]