Payless Car Rental · 1999 to 2009

Twelve home pages:
what I was handed, and what I left

I started at Payless Car Rental on 5 May 2002. I was nineteen, the site was more than a thousand hand built HTML files, and I worked on it until the end of 2009. This is the front page across that whole run, plus the three years before it so you can see what I walked into.

Every frame is a real capture from the Internet Archive, rebuilt from the original bytes and photographed at 1024 by 768, the size these pages were drawn for. The counts under each one say how much of that day's page still exists. Where a year did not survive, or a redesign launched while the crawler was away, it says so instead of guessing.

1999 to April 2002: not my work

The first four frames are the site as I found it. I have included them because the point of a before is that somebody else made it.

30 April 1999

The earliest one that survives

Red pill buttons in two columns, a script headline reading Franchise Opportunities Available, and a row of pipe separated text links under it. There is no search box and no booking form anywhere on the page: renting a car here means finding a button and leaving for somewhere else.

7 of 16 files survive. Nine of the sixteen images this page asks for have no capture in the archive at any date, so the empty boxes are holes in the record rather than something a visitor in 1999 would have seen.

www.800-payless.com/
1999 Payless home page: red oval buttons labeled Vehicles and Policies, Customer Service, Travel Agents, Maps and Directions, Payless Car Sales and Career Opportunities, with broken image placeholders between them.
1024 × 577 Open the full picture
2 October 2000

The flag logo arrives

One column of blue gel buttons down the left and picture links to the right of them: a world map for Worldwide Locations, a compass seal for the Passport Club, Franchise Sales, Vehicles and Policies, Travel Agents and Nifty Fifty. An Español toggle sits at the top right and a Planet Payless seal at the foot.

23 of 25 files survive. The footer dates itself: Last Updated: 30 September, 2000.

www.800-payless.com/index.html
2000 Payless home page with the red, yellow and blue flag logo, a stack of blue navigation buttons and a grid of picture links.
1024 × 958 Open the full picture
1 December 2001

The navigation goes horizontal

The button stack is gone. Eleven links move into a single purple bar across the top next to a thirtieth anniversary badge, a Quick Quote form takes the left column, Internet Specials and Press Releases run down the page under it, and the right rail carries Live Agent Chat, Payless Lodging and the ACTIF and ASTA member badges.

27 of 33 files survive. This is the layout I would inherit five months later, in its first form.

www.paylesscarrental.com/index.html
2001 Payless home page with a horizontal purple navigation bar, a Quick Quote form and press release text down the page.
1024 × 915 Open the full picture
18 April 2002

The site I was handed

The same bar and the same Quick Quote as December, with the green ground dropped for white and a Passport Club Savings panel added in the middle column. Seventeen days after this capture I started.

21 of 27 files survive. This one is a working exhibit rather than a picture. All 1,225 pages of it run: open Payless Car Rental, before I got there.

www.800-payless.com/Index.html
2002 Payless home page on a white ground with a Quick Quote form, a Passport Club Savings panel and two press releases.
1024 × 924 Open the full picture

5 May 2002. I start.

I was nineteen, and I moved to Florida for the job. Everything below this line is mine.

27 October 2002

First redesign under me

Five months in. The tall bar becomes a slim strip of six sections, the masthead takes the line Payless Car Rental offers a great driving experience worldwide, Quick Quote becomes a Quick Search with residence and destination as separate fields, three promotional banners stack down the right, and the news splits into Feature Stories and Current News in two columns.

15 of 17 files survive. This is the first design on the account that is mine.

www.paylesscarrental.com/Index.html
Late 2002 Payless home page with a slim navigation strip, a Quick Search form and three stacked promotional banners.
1024 × 1083 Open the full picture
19 September 2003

The home page becomes a program

The address is index.asp now, not Index.html. The shape of the page is close to the year before, but almost none of the artwork was captured, so what is left is the table it all sat in, one surviving Nifty Fifty banner and the news columns.

8 of 40 files survive. Eight of forty. The whole seasonal overlay set and the shared brand navigation were never archived, and the surviving source tree on my own disks does not hold them either. There is no way to show this year whole, so it is here broken rather than skipped: this is the year the site stopped being files.

www.paylesscarrental.com/index.asp
2003 Payless home page rendered with its navigation artwork missing, leaving empty table cells above the Feature Stories and Current News columns.
1024 × 1331 Open the full picture
29 December 2004

just drive.

A full rebrand. Orange and blue color blocks sit beside the logo under the line just drive., the navigation bar turns purple, the promotional banners are cut with a swoosh, and a row at the foot lists the sister brands: Payless Car Rental, Car Sales, Airport Parking, Self Storage and Hotel/Motel.

27 of 43 files survive. The crawler was away from 2 April to 8 November 2004, and this design launched inside that hole, so the most that can be said is after 2 April and by 8 November. The empty slot in the middle belongs to a banner rotator that picks one of three promotions from the current second. All three of its images are gone, so what the archive kept is the caption it would have carried.

www.paylesscarrental.com/
2004 Payless home page with orange and blue color blocks beside the logo, the words just drive., a purple navigation bar and a newsletter signup.
1024 × 1508 Open the full picture

2005 is not missing

Sixteen home page captures survive from 2005 and every one of them is the design above. There is no frame here for that year because nothing changed that a screenshot would show. The crawler was away from 15 June to 18 October 2006 as well, and nothing changed across that gap either.

16 November 2006

Two years in the same frame

Same design, carrying more. Payless Perks joins the navigation, four swoosh banners stack where three sat, a strip of four cars with Domestic and International tabs appears under the Quick Quote, and a Hot Destinations block of city by city copy runs a long way down the page.

27 of 30 files survive. The tallest frame in the run at 2,197 pixels, almost all of it the destination copy added below the fold.

www.paylesscarrental.com/
2006 Payless home page, the same just drive. design with a Payless Perks banner, a fleet strip and a long Hot Destinations section.
1024 × 2197 Open the full picture
21 September 2007

Rebuilt again

A photograph of a road through a windshield runs across the masthead with Just drive at its right, the navigation becomes a row of tabs, Online Specials become three chevrons down the left, a Payless Perks login panel takes the right, and a Car Rental Blogger panel sits at the foot beside Hot Destinations and an RSS feed.

61 of 69 files survive. This one landed inside a hole too: after 1 December 2006 and by 15 February 2007. 2007 is the thinnest year in the whole record, with five surviving home page captures.

www.paylesscarrental.com/
2007 Payless home page with a gray windshield photograph across the top, tabbed navigation, three Online Specials chevrons and a Payless Perks login panel.
1024 × 1295 Open the full picture

The gap the next rebuild launched in

Between 27 September 2007 and 1 May 2008 there is no capture of this home page at all. The version below went live somewhere inside those seven months. I will not put a date on it that the record cannot support.

1 May 2008

Rebuilt a second time, and rebuilt whole

Booking becomes a numbered bar: 1 Search, 2 Select, 3 Confirm, with a Car Deals To-Go hero beside it and three promotional tiles underneath. The date fields default to 05/02/2008 and 05/04/2008, which is the crawler catching tomorrow.

37 of 37 files survive. Thirty seven of thirty seven. The only capture in the whole run where every single file the page asks for is still in the archive. Of the pages in this version and the one before it, 16 percent are common to both: it is a rebuild, not a reskin.

www.paylesscarrental.com/
2008 Payless home page with a numbered Search, Select, Confirm booking bar, a red car in a Car Deals To-Go banner and three promotional tiles.
1024 × 1133 Open the full picture
27 March 2009

The last one at this address

The same build with its artwork redrawn: a $5 off Daily Upgrades hero, a fourth promotional tile, one tile for the iPhone and one for Twitter, and a Give Feedback flag pinned across the top left corner.

46 of 47 files survive. After this date every capture of paylesscarrental.com is a redirect. This is the last one with a page behind it.

www.paylesscarrental.com/
March 2009 Payless home page with a five dollars off Daily Upgrades banner and four promotional tiles including Twitter and iPhone.
1024 × 1290 Open the full picture
31 July 2009

The domain moves

Same code at a new address. A yellow band across the top reads Wanna type less? Payless Car Rental is now at PaylessCar.com, the wordmark gains PaylessCar.com underneath it, the hero becomes Midsize Cars $30/day, and Payless Perks is renamed perks club.

45 of 47 files survive. A different host, the same application. This is the shape the site was in when I left it at the end of the year.

www.paylesscar.com/
July 2009 Payless home page on the new domain, with a yellow banner announcing the move to PaylessCar.com and a Midsize Cars thirty dollars a day banner.
1024 × 1166 Open the full picture

And that is where I leave it

I worked on this site until the end of 2009. It carried on afterwards on the new domain, under people who were not me, so the run stops here rather than following a design I had nothing to do with.

Where all of this came from

The captures

Nothing here is a reconstruction. Each frame is one archived home page, fetched as the raw stored bytes so that no archive toolbar and no rewritten link appears in the picture, with every image and stylesheet it references fetched at that same capture timestamp. The page was then rendered in a browser at 1024 pixels wide and photographed whole.

The counts are measured, not estimated: each referenced file was requested and its result recorded. When a file came back missing it was looked for again across the entire index for all three host names, at any date. Exactly one turned up, a site icon from 2012 that postdates everything here, and it was left out. Every gap on this page is a gap in the archive itself.

Three host names served this site

  • 800-payless.com, the address from 1999 until the middle of 2003.
  • paylesscarrental.com, mirroring the same pages from May 2001 and the main address from September 2003 until March 2009.
  • paylesscar.com, the same application at a shorter address from the middle of 2009.

What could not be dated exactly

Three redesigns went live while the crawler was not visiting, so they can only be bracketed:

  • the just drive. rebrand: after 2 April 2004, by 8 November 2004
  • the 2007 rebuild: after 1 December 2006, by 15 February 2007
  • the 2008 rebuild: after 27 September 2007, by 1 May 2008

Every other date on this page is the exact timestamp of the capture shown.

What did not survive

September 2003 is the worst of it. That frame is the month the front page stopped being a file and started being a program, which makes it one of the more important ones here, and only eight of the forty files it needs exist anywhere. Its navigation art and its seasonal overlay were never captured, and they are not in my own surviving copy of the source either. It is shown broken because the alternative was to leave out the year it changed.

2010 and later are not here at all. I was gone by then.