When Slate launched on June 24, 1996, it looked a lot more like a print magazine that happened to be published on the Web than a product created specifically for the new medium (although the New Republic never played a Fats Waller tune when you opened it, as the early Slate did).

The first home page featured a traditional table of contents—complete with page numbers. Rather than surfing, or whatever the verb du jour was, readers were expected to "flip through" the stories, page by page.

Ten years on, it's hard to remember how strange and novel online publishing seemed back then. Founding Editor Michael Kinsley spent four paragraphs of his introductory piece instructing readers on how to navigate the Web site (and advising anxious visitors who "don't like reading on a computer screen" about all the ways they could print out Slate and read it on paper).

The original design was elegant and spare—and packed with white space. One reason is that we hadn't sold much advertising—we intended to cover our costs by charging $19.95 per year for access. These days most Web sites are designed to cram in as many ads as possible.