One of the first-ever online magazines has brought its archives back from the dead after closing shop over a decade ago. Word Magazine, which operated as Word.com from 1995 through 2000, has restored and republished the first three years of its content. The pieces return in the stunning — albeit rudimentary — layouts that they were published in, many of which explored the relationship between web design and narrative. Restoring these elaborate layouts has apparently been a slow process because of how much web technologies have changed between now and then.

The first portion of the magazine's archives is now being hosted at deadword.com. The remaining two years of content will be added eventually, but the site says that they're "in pretty bad shape" at the moment. For now, it's resurrecting those final two years through an extensive series of screenshots and animated GIFs, a few of which we've collected below. As for the rest of it, you should certainly take some time to explore the experimental magazine's labyrinthine archives themselves.