answer:8 years takes us back to the beginning of sites really moving towards “standards”, meaning tableless layouts based on markup and CSS. That’s a huge change that was just finding widespread use around then. Now it’s assumed for any modern site. That also takes us before asynchronous content was so common (AJAX, XMLHTTP, whatever you would like to call it) and that’s really changed what people expect in terms of features on the sites they use every day. Before that new content on the page always required a page refresh. So for example the preview feature here on Fluther, and the fact that you don’t have to refresh the page to see new posts were both considered voodoo magic at one point. I would say those are the two biggest underlying changes in that time frame. Layout trends would largely be driven by those indirectly. Standards made fixed width columned designs extremely easy and so those became the norm. We’ve just recently gotten to the point where fluid (fill a percentage of the available screen) or responsive (adapt to the screen size including changing their layout) sites have become a likely option for sites built around changing content. Colors, textures, typography, and interaction trends change on an ongoing basis fairly quickly. Most things fall off, the really good or useful stuff sticks for longer, but there’s so much experimentation and you can see the best in the world doing their thing (and how they did it) that we’ve been through tons of ideas in the last 8 years. You have to remember that the web as a medium is really only about 15 years old, so 8 years encompasses a large portion of the history. Short answer, huge changes in the last 8 years. If you’re interested in seeing sites form 2005, Time does an article “50 Best Websites” a lot of years (I don’t know if it’s every year)... here’s 2005 with screenshots. The Wayback Machine probably has some of them saved if you want to check out how they actually operated as well.