From “Try Nick on AOL”
to “DO NOT TOUCH”

The April 30, 1997 capture is the oldest nick.com homepage we could use, and it is a teaser. The browser title says Coming Soon - NICK.COM. The whole page is one framed box in the top left corner of the screen, and the rest of the window is plain lime green.

There is exactly one thing to enter. Under Click here to enter... sits a single gray button for natalie's backseat traveling [web] show. Everything else on the page is about later, or about somewhere else. The yellow starburst in the corner tells AOL members which keyword to type to find Nickelodeon there.

Four months earlier the address showed even less. The December 19, 1996 capture is two lines of text: Sorry! This site is not yet available to the public.

By July 12, 1998 the teaser is gone, and nick.com is a page built from frames. A big field of lime-green blobs holds one promotion in the middle: Peep CatDog's new movie!, with Cat on a red couch asking Pass the popcorn, Dog...Dog?!

Six tiles form two columns on the right, each with a picture label and a short caption: Get on board with Surf Beaver Trivia!, Send your ideas to the nickelOzone!, Ready to DEcompose a monstrous melody?, Lori Beth Needs Your Votes in SPLAT!, We've got a Q for U! and Time for a Mack Attack! A black bar along the bottom has six picture buttons, from HOME and info to Nick Jr. and Nick at Nite.

The page’s code keeps a note for browsers that couldn’t show frames. It begins Sorry, but this website requires a browser that supports frames and sells the site in one line: Click Nick and get Nickelodeon TV stuff, hot games, slime, cool jokes and Nickelodeon celebrity gossip! It ends with a word missing: Come back when you a browser that supports frames. By the 1999 capture somebody had added the have.

The April 29, 1999 homepage is bright green under a purple bar. The Nickelodeon logo in that bar is shaped like a blimp, followed by small logos for Nick GaS, Noggin, Nick Jr. and Nick at Nite and two dropdown menus, Pick a Show! and What's Hot!

A black-outlined box on the left is headed TODAY’S SPECIALS. Its first item is the NICKELLENNIUM: Go cuckoo for our brand new clickable clock! The middle column reads like a list of jokes: It's the KABLAM!-iest!, Get down with some groovy ghouls!, Nicktionary - It's simply define! and, for the Rugrats movie, Get the buzz on the babies! Several pictures are missing in this capture. Their names show up as underlined links next to broken-image icons.

By November 29, 2001 the capture shows a new logo: an orange ball with Nick written across it and .com beside it. Under it runs a row of rounded tabs, each in its own color: Home, All Nick, Games, Music, Web Lab, Blab and Your World. The central feature area is blank in this screenshot. What remains is a left column and a stack of colored panels under Today on nick.com!

The left column asks for something every few inches. First a Daily Poll, What do you wish you could do most?, with four answers (Fly, Drive, See through walls, Be a video game tester) and a Vote! button. Then Introducing my e-Collectibles! and Score NickPoints! Swap for cards! Then a login box that asks for a NickName and offers to Remember my NickName and password so I won't have to log in next time.

The site menu in the page’s code lists 50 places to go. They run from Nick Games and Turbo Nick Arcade through a Joke Center, Weird News, Daily Horoscopes and a Calculator to an Online Safety Guide and Write to Nick.com.

In June 2002 the frame is the same, with a Shop tab added at the end of the row. The poll has a new question, What do you daydream about the most?, and four answers: Summer, Your crush, Sports and Dinner. Above it, a red tile announces Hey Arnold! The Movie, In theaters June 28!, and an ad at the top of the page reads Hey Mom!

The polls weren’t only on the homepage. The games directory from August 2001 had its own, in a purple Games Poll box: What's the most annoying car game? The choices were Punch-a-buggy, Twenty questions, The alphabet game and I spy.

The same page explains BubbleCast under Multi-Player Games: Log on every Sunday @ 5:30 PM (ET) when the 'Cast takes on Taina in TEENick! It calls the idea a new way to play TV.

On October 29, 2003 the lime-and-black frame is dressed for Halloween. The poll asks Best Halloween prop? (Vampire teeth, Fake blood, Wacky wig or Candy bucket), and the colored panels offer games, e-cards and music: one says Choose from tons of TERRIFYING tunes! Another is for a show, not a game: Everyone's favorite witch is on Nick! Monday-Thursday and Sunday @ 8:30 PM/7:30c!

By November 16, 2004 the colored panels are gone. A gray frame holds a grid of white boxes, each under a green label: ALL NICK, GAMES, myNICK or BLAB. Most of them are games. The first box reads Twonkies are taking over Retroville AND nick.com! Click here stop 'em!, with the to missing. The Basketball Machine box has a short sales pitch: You point. You click. You shoot. You SCORE!

The message board box counts down to a film: SpongeBob hits the big screen 11/19...post your predictions NOW. The capture is from three days before.

The June 16, 2005 homepage keeps the gray frame. Its feature slot at the top is a blank red box in this screenshot. Under it is a grid of games: Avatar: Autumn Twilight Game, a Fairly OddParents rhythm game and SpongeBob’s Jellyfish Shuffleboard. An e-Collectibles box asks kids to Collect all 10 EXCLUSIVE "The Fairly OddParents School's Out" trading cards NOW! The show menu in the code lists 29 series, from Aaahh! Real Monsters to Zoey 101.

The games directory from January 1, 2005 sorts the games into rooms. The Head-to-Head Games line is the most 2005 thing in this whole story: Play checkers, chess and more as your favorite Nick character, then email your move to a friend!

Animation World Network reported that TurboNick’s soft launch on Nick.com began on July 1, 2005, about two weeks after this capture, with clips and full episodes from 30 seconds to 22 minutes long. Users could change the look of their TurboNick player.^[1]

Our attempts did not produce usable homepage captures for 2006 to 2008. Those pages depended on Flash, and their replays show little more than a background. The November 15, 2009 capture shows what came after: a white page with an orange lowercase nick logo. The visible main navigation reads Home, Games, Videos, Shows, Music and UPick, with MYNICK beside the login controls, and the page’s code adds a Nicktropolis link. The hero area at the top shows only a loading indicator, but the rows below it are labeled NOW BEING PLAYED and NOW BEING WATCHED.

Nicktropolis opened on January 30, 2007, as a virtual world reached through nicktropolis.com or Nick.com. Kids made an avatar and their own 3D room, then played games to collect Nickpoints and spent them on things for the room. The name is the same one the 2001 login box used. World Screen described rooms themed on SpongeBob’s Bikini Bottom and Jimmy Neutron’s Retroville (reported). At the launch Nickelodeon quoted its own study: 86 percent of kids aged 8 to 14 were gaming online.^[2][3]

The games directory from January 2009 has both names in its sidebar. Nicktropolis has its own link, and a tile below it says Full-length episodes in TurboNick!

From 2010 to 2013 the white portal keeps its shape and swaps the star at the top. On June 16, 2010 it asks for a vote: Make sure YOUR fave game wins the AddictingGames Showdown on 6/19! The games directory that March opens on a count, 976 Games, sorted Newest first. Six of the first fifteen tiles carry the same title, Know Your Nemesis.

On June 16, 2011 an ad for the film Zookeeper wraps around the whole page, and SpongeBob sits in the middle under NEW ANIMATION: Grab your Dad for brand new episodes of Fairly Odd Parents and SpongeBob this Saturday at 10/9c! November 2012 belongs to Marvin Marvin, LUCAS IS BACK!, and the promise to meet the world's FIRST Klootonian alien. June 2013 is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: CATCH THE LATEST EPISODE!

The footer grows a row for grown-ups in these years. Next to the privacy policy it links to Ground Rules, Parents and Report a Concern.

The May 1, 2014 capture is our last selected example of the white portal. Sam & Cat leads, ON SET WITH LIL' SAM & CAT, with a line about how Coco is WAY too cray for Dice to handle behind the scenes of #FirstClassProblems! Under it are the usual rows of games and episodes.

Scroll down and one video section has a heading that tells you to stay away: DO NOT WATCH! The first video in it is a walkthrough from NickGamer; the second is Shredder Shreds!, about Shredder showing a gentler side.

Three months later this page was replaced. On August 4, 2014 Nickelodeon launched a new Nick.com, and its press release described the change in one sentence: the site leaves behind conventional long pages and vertical scroll in favor of a unique interface: an edge-to-edge landscape design that fills the screen as kids navigate the site horizontally. The idea came from the Nick App, which Nickelodeon said had more than 10 million downloads. The new design started on desktop and laptop computers; tablets and phones were promised by fall.^[4]

The June 16, 2015 capture shows the result. The white page has turned into an orange canvas with a flat white nick logo and four menu items: Games, Videos, Episodes and Radio. Cards of different sizes run off the right edge of the screen. Our screenshot is 1440 pixels wide and stops at that edge, so the rest of the row is missing from the picture.

The video player followed the app too. In Nickelodeon’s words, the player controls and navigation fade away, and then reappear with a rollover or tap.^[4]

The show menu in the 2015 code still lists Welcome to the Wayne. It premiered on the redesign’s launch day as Nick.com’s first digital-only series: six episodes of four to five minutes about two ten-year-old boys exploring their New York City apartment building, The Wayne. It was already being developed for a TV series.^[4]

In June 2016 The Thundermans fill the left side with FULL EPISODES and WATCH THE NEWEST. At the August 2014 launch, Nickelodeon said users could unlock full episodes through participating TV providers, which together reached more than 50 million homes.^[4]

In the November 16, 2017 capture the orange page scrolls down again, in rows of cards under a strip of round character faces. Portal Chase leads. Halfway down, between a Loud House episode and a Boat-O-Cross 3 game, there is a big green button with DO NOT TOUCH on it.

The button is older than this capture. The August 2014 press release already listed the famed Do Not Touch button among the new site’s games and videos.^[4] What happened when a kid pressed it, our captures don’t show. The May 2014 page had tried the same trick with a whole section called DO NOT WATCH!

In June 2018 the button is still there, lower down, among game and episode cards. A pop-up message in the page’s code speaks to kids who reached a locked episode: Grab an adult to unlock more episodes. The gray band across the 2016, 2017 and 2018 screenshots is where we hid a legal notice that covered the page.

On June 16, 2019 the orange is gone. The homepage is purple, led by Kids’ Choice Sports and VOTE NOW!, with a row promoting the Nick App and two games below. The browser title now lists devices: Nickelodeon Shows, Games & Apps for iPhone, Android, Roku and More.

In June 2020 the top banner is a pile of phones and tablets and one line: WATCH EPISODES NOW ON THE NICK APP! The page’s code still carries a welcome paragraph in the old style: Welcome to Nick.com, where you can find all your favorite Nick shows!

June 2021 opens on Danger Force, with a panel advertising the new Nick Helps site in the row below. The code has a row called Unlocked Episodes, and the first one is a 22:29 episode of Tyler Perry’s Young Dylan.

In our June 2022 capture a row of round character faces runs across the top of the purple page. The big picture under it promotes the Nickelodeon Slime Cup with a cartoon golf-course scene.

June 2023 is Transformers: EarthSpark. The character slots at the top appear as gray circles in this capture. The header links to Nick Helps, and a section farther down in the code points to Pluto TV channels.

By our June 2024 capture the header carries the full Nickelodeon name over an orange splat, and the page around the purple hero is orange. The Kids’ Choice Awards ask for votes in big letters, It's Slime to make your picks!, and the small print under the headline adds a condition.

The November 2025 capture keeps the orange background. PAW Patrol fills the top, CATCH PAW PATROL WEEKDAYS ON NICKELODEON, with rows of episode cards below. The capture’s code names the owner: Nickelodeon is a division of Paramount, a Skydance Corporation (Nasdaq: PSKY).

The September 16, 2026 capture opens on the Kids’ Choice Awards 2026 and VOTING OPENS SOON! Under it, a row of round buttons leads to full episodes of SpongeBob, Loud House and the rest. The browser title is two words and a bar: Nickelodeon | Homepage.

1997 · COMING...1997 · Then2026 · VOTING OPENS SOON!2026 · Now

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Twenty-nine years apart, the first and the last capture both announce something that hasn’t happened yet. In 1997 it was the website itself, COMING..., with a pointer to AOL for anyone who couldn’t wait. In 2026 it is a vote, and the page says so in the same capital letters.