In 2009 I joined the BBC and have been part of the Future Media Radio and Music team since then. The BBC has always embraced the Internet and WWW and we've worked on many projects over the years with so many people being involved in bringing the BBCs content to the audience—so I thought I'd look through the Internet archive for past incarnations of bbc.co.uk/radio (or 'slash radio' as we call it) and annotate some of the major milestones in the history of iPlayer Radio with the UK number one from that day...
The earliest archive I can find is this BBC Online site from 1998
Current UK Number 1: All Saints "Never Ever"
1999 brought a simple re-design, focused around schedules
Current UK Number 1: Britney Spears "Baby One More Time"
Maybe the millenium bug struck in 2000, because this is all the archive has for that year
Current UK Number 1: All Saints "Pure Shores"
2001 started with a bang, with this bold orange and blue site
Current UK Number 1: Bob the Builder "Mambo No. 5"
By November 2001 the site had a new BBCi look and featured teasers for upcoming stations 'Network X' and 'Network Y'; guess which they are! ;)
Current UK Number 1: Kylie Minogue "Can't Get You out of My Head"
This design remained until 2003 when 'BBC Radio Player' arrived on the site and the new stations revealed
Current UK Number 1: Room 5 featuring Oliver Cheatham "Make Luv"
2004 saw a small re-design and the—at the time ubiquitous—'make this my homepage' link
Current UK Number 1: Michael Andrews and Gary Jules "Mad World"
2005 saw some more content in the footer and the BBC blocks turned into bbc.co.uk
Current UK Number 1: Elvis Presley "Jailhouse Rock"
The site was given a new look in 2006 with beveled buttons, more links to audio and the BBC blocks returned
Current UK Number 1: Gnarls Barkley "Crazy"
This design remained for 2007 although the network logos had a re-design to give them a common feel
Current UK Number 1: Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson and D.O.E. "The Way I Are"
2008 kept the same design
Current UK Number 1: Katie Melua and Eva Cassidy "What A Wonderful World"
Although in 2009, the year I joined the BBC, the site had another re-design
Current UK Number 1: JLS "Everybody in Love"
This remained into 2010 and this year saw the introduction of the 'Barlesque' top navigation menu
Current UK Number 1: Roll Deep "Good Times"
Which was then moved to the right later in 2010
Current UK Number 1: Rihanna "Only Girl (In the World)"
The same design remained into 2011
Current UK Number 1: The Wanted "Glad You Came"
Later again in 2012 the the 'radio product' officially became iPlayer Radio and we released a new 'landing page' which provided a jumping-off point for visitors and a banner ad for the new native apps for iOS and Android
Current UK Number 1: Robbie Williams "Candy"
The banner started to be used as cross-network advertising in 2013
Current UK Number 1: Justin Timberlake "Mirrors"
Then BBC Playlister arrived so the landing page was given a Playlister theme
Current UK Number 1: Katy Perry "Roar"
In 2014 the landing page became the 'dashboard' and displayed a snapshot of what was happening now. So we could display content from all of the Stations we cycle through them, providing a 'pause' button to stop the cycling for accessibility reasons. The site also had the 'radio nav' lower navigation for quick access to stations, categories etc and featured a Playlister link.
Current UK Number 1: Pharrell Williams "Happy"
The logo got a boost in point size and the a-z button arrived
Current UK Number 1: Meghan Trainor "All About That Bass"
Later in 2014 we decided to change the 'pause' button to a 'stop cycling' button as it was causing confusion.
Current UK Number 1: Gareth Malone's All Star Choir "Wake Me Up"
Playlister then left the radio nav to develop its own identity
Current UK Number 1: Ben Haenow "Something I Need"
Which brings us to the current site in the early part of 2015
Current UK Number 1: Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars "Uptown Funk"
We've been working on 'iPlayer Radio v2.0' on our new cloud platform for around a year now so 2015 will see another step-change in the BBC radio website from its humble beginnings as a simple BBC Online website.