Last week I distributed Historian for Hire’s  first e-update. In the one-pager I mentioned the first professional Web site I created. Designed for Cultural Resource Analysts, a cultural resource management company in Lexington, Kentucky, the site went live in January 1996. My local files for time I maintained the site have long since succumbed to data rot but the good folks over at the Internet Archive have it preserved on their servers. It’s not pretty nor is it flashy, but it did the job. And, if you surf through the company’s current Web site structure you will see that despite almost 15 years and multiple webmeisters, the basic architecture that I designed remains intact.

CRAI’s owner Chuck Niquette advertised the new site in a post to a young professional organization’s public listserv, ACRA-L. A few days later I registered the company’s new domain name and moved the site off of my grad school Internet account held at the University of Pennsylvania. The screen capture shows the front page in early 1996 and below is CRAI President Chuck Niquette’s announcement of its birth:

CRAI Home Page Announcement.