Hall of fame — no. 1
Craigslist
Est. 1998Craig Newmark started it as an email to friends — and 30 years on, it still looks like one.
▶ CRAIGSLIST · 1998
CRAIGSLIST · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — Craigslist, 1998 → 2026.
The ugly part. It began as Craig Newmark emailing event listings to a few dozen friends. When the list outgrew email he dropped it onto a plain HTML page — blue links on grey, no images, no design. People called it ugly. He left it that way.
Why it stuck. The plainness was the point: pages loaded instantly, listings were trivial to scan, and nothing sat between a buyer and a seller. Keeping all but a few categories free meant there was little reason to go anywhere else.
Now. One of the most-visited sites in the US, still served from the same spartan template it launched with.