Old specialist sites are often at their best when the author tells you exactly what the site is good at—and exactly where it is a little crap.
Visit World War 1 Naval Combat
This site focuses mainly on surface warfare between the Imperial German Navy and the British Royal Navy during the First World War.
Its front page routes visitors into the Battle of Heligoland Bight, the loss of HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, HMS Audacious, Admiral Graf Spee’s cruiser squadron, Dogger Bank, Jutland, major warship losses, the Scapa Flow scuttling, warship reference pages, dispatches and image collections.
Then the author offers one of the more useful disclaimers on the historical Web: the maps are crude, should be treated as rough indications, and if the maps disagree with the text, the text is probably “the least inaccurate.”
Do not plan your holiday with them, he adds.
That is how you earn trust online.
A personal history site with scope discipline
The author openly explains why British and German forces dominate the site: they were the major naval powers involved in this part of the war, and he is British, so those navies are what interest him most.
That admission is more useful than pretending the archive emerged from nowhere with perfect neutrality.
The site is also a reminder of how much military-history material once lived in hand-built topic pages rather than giant databases. A visitor could start with one battle, follow individual ships, move into fleet losses, compare photographs and read dispatch material without being pushed into a recommendation engine.
The copyright footer runs from 1998 to 2026, making the site itself nearly as interesting as some of the material it preserves. This is not a frozen GeoCities snapshot. It is an old-style site whose basic architecture survived long enough to span dial-up, broadband, smartphones, social media and the present day without deciding that every naval battle needed a vertical video.
The design is not polished by modern standards. That is not a serious problem.
Historical reference work benefits from predictable structure, visible navigation and pages that remain at the same URLs for years. Fancy interfaces have a habit of becoming archaeological layers themselves.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list exists to surface sites like this: individual researchers who built durable knowledge structures before the Web learned to confuse redesign with improvement.
There are newer naval-history resources. There are prettier ones. There are certainly more comprehensive ones.
But there is something valuable about a site where the author has spent decades saying, in effect: here are the battles I care about, here is what I found, and please do not navigate the North Sea using my GIF maps.