15 years, 230 million page views

I recall quite vividly what I was doing 15 years ago: I was leading a team at the Tri-City Herald that was launching tricityherald.com.

Some 15 years later, our website has gone through a half-dozen iterations, and we've brought in 230 million page views. In the meantime, the web has gone from a mere curiosity to a vital part of the news business. Like radio and TV before it - though on a much greater scale - the Internet has deeply disrupted the newspaper business. Frankly, it's disrupted just about every business and most of our lives.

Fifteen years ago, the World Wide Web was still quite young. I think we all knew it was something more than a fad, though we weren't willing to admit it. Back then, AOL was king and message boards were still all the rage. The idea of posting video was beyond our abilities because most users were using dial-up connections.

I recall a number of meetings with then-Publisher Jack Briggs, an old-school newspaper man who didn't necessarily want a website but also wasn't afraid to move forward, either. I was running the copy desk back then, and he came up to the newsroom and said, "Perdue, we need a website, and you have 30 days to put one together."

While I was comfortable with technology (I oversaw our newsroom's migration to full pagination a half-decade before), I barely knew how to spell "HTML" at that time. So I bought a couple of books, invested in a program called PageMill and got to work. A half-dozen of us worked together on the site, with me in charge of designing its look and feel and figuring out how we would get our stories from our news system to the Internet. Clay Myers, our IT director at the time, worked on how to port the classifieds (a much more difficult task). Jeanie Jensen, a longtime employee who now works for me, handled the ads and some of the design.

Early on, we decided to register the domain tri-cityherald.com, something I've regretted ever since. A couple of years later, we registered tricityherald.com (sans hyphen) as a second URL, but that early choice has caused no small number of headaches through the years, especially with email addresses.

Speaking of email addresses, in the early days I had to use my personal AOL email because we weren't set up to handle company emails. Not long after we launched the site and figured out how to make our internal email system work with the Internet, I recall the newsroom having one computer reporters could all share to check emails (that was a pain, and it didn't last long).

That first site was, how shall I put this, really ugly. See for yourself. It didn't take me long to realize that I need to hand the design duties over to a designer, and Jeanie Jensen has handled that for most of our history.

By 1998, we'd upgraded our look to include an animated sun going across the sky. Check it out.

Here's what we looked like not long after the Sept. 11 attacks.

By 2003, we started to dabble a bit with breaking news and enlarged our lead photo.

Our current look came along in 2007 (with a few tweaks along the way).

Our next change will come along in the next 18 months or so as we move to a radically different format (more on that at another time).

It's been a fun 15 years since we launched tricityherald.com, and we are pleased to be an important part of the Tri-City community.

This story was originally published May 27, 2011 at 8:34 PM with the headline "15 years, 230 million page views."