A History of CKUT Websites
With CKUT's new 2023 website launching this week, we take a look back at the history of our station on the web.
From what we can tell, this brief article in the November edition of Spurious Radiation (CKUT’s internal newsletter in the late ’80s and early ’90s) is the first reference to CKUT being on the internet. We’ll keep digging though…
CKUT’s first website was ear-themed and launched in 1997. Check out a version of it archived from October 1999 on the Internet Wayback Machine here.
It was simple but sweet. There are lots of references to ears at CKUT. If You Got Ears, 20 Years Between Your Ears… I’m sure there’s more…
A sign of the times? In late 2002, the ear-themed site morphed into this short lived hot mess:
Less than a year later, the site changed again and got a little less warped and a little more crispy. This 2003 version had a humble hand-drawn style and added the ability to check out the station’s recent programming archives, going back a few months:
The look was revamped slightly around late 2005 and was our home on the net for the following 8 years:
In early 2013, CKUT’s website changed again, sliding into the more “standardized” logo era of the following decade. Sharper lines, less illustrations. You know the look:
Archives going back 6 months were enabled in the late 2010’s and “Endless archives” were added in November 2020, preserving our 24/7 programming… forever. This design ran largely unchanged for a decade, all the way up to its’ final days, seen below:
In February 2023, after three years of brainstorming and development, our current webesite launched us into the present. Programmers now have control over their own show pages and can post public track lists, there’s a chat room and user profiles for listeners, and it’s mobile-friendly. Part of the new site is powered by KenzoDB, which has been driving the website of New Jersey freeform radio powerhouse WFMU for 22 years with some really cool results.
Thanks for sticking with us all these years. We’re excited about what is next.
