INTERNET

How to keep your visitors hooked to your website

2008-11-05T20:38:00.000-08:00

Your main aim while designing a website should be to hook visitors on your designed – friendly website. Besides knowing the standard design principles, one must also be aware of the practical methods involved in making the visitors stay on to the website as long as possible. The tips involved for keeping visitors on your website are as follows:

1) Cut the hype and be teachable:

These days there is a common practice of attracting visitors with impressive sales letter and web pages of hype being created with the sense of making things urgent and interesting. But do you think that the visitors will really get hooked to this steaming piles of hype?

A good designed website must provide informational content with little or no sales talks. Also, after informing them about the service, one must also teach them how to use the service. Just pure information will not be enough. You need to also guide them with a sense of teaching attitude. If the above two mentioned prints are fulfilled, you will then definitely not only attract visitors on to your website but will be successful in hooking them permanently.

2) Update your page:

Once the visitors reach your website, you can expect them to come again only with the intention of reading something new. Hence, you must update your page on a regular basis. In this way the same visitors would frequently like to come and visit your website to read something fresh.

3) Provide a blog to your website:

These days its common and preferable to have a blog added to your website. It’s a way to add more and more content for visitors. It’s the best way to build a community based website.

You will notice serious visitors regularly visiting your website. But just having a blog is not enough. You also need to see that your blog is maintained with good and new content.

4) Provide simple navigation facility:

In my experience, I have visited many website and I easily got lost. The main reason behind this was “poor navigation” facility being provided for the conceived website.
Navigation links should be provided through out the web pages. The navigation bar provided on the home page should be kept on all landing pages. By this way, the visitors will not get lost.

5) Have item pictures:

A picture speaks louder than words. You must provide product pictures on the website. Customers will prefer to see the picture of an item before they actually receive the product in hand.

6) Describe the item:

It is always recommended to give all the specification details of the product. Try to describe as much as possible. If you provide product features details and other information of the product, you will leave no soon for doubt in the minds of the customer, before they finally decide to purchase the product.

7) Explain the benefits of the product:

Many website owners are good at describing the product features. Example: Remote control switch, capable of switching on alternate current operated appliances, special relay contacts etc. People are less interested in the features and are more interested to know the various benefits that are involved in the product. In this case, people would highly appreciate if you describe benefits of a remote control by saying that you can switch on your electric bulb or a tube light with the help of this remote control switch. It becomes easy and interesting for a customer to learn the benefits of an item rather than putting a list of products technical features, in front of him.

8) Provide a secured website:

Well, you have kept all the above seven points in mind while designing a website. But yet, there are chances that in spite of following the above mentioned guide lines, you may fail to attract customers. It may happen that a major chunk of your visitors may not feel like buying through your website. This may happen if you don’t have a website which is secured. Hence, your website must incorporate trust building tools like verisign and BBB online. Make it bound and clear to your visitors and buyers that your website is secured.

I urge web designers to sincerely follow the above mentioned tips and thus see yourself being successful in hooking visitors and buyers on the concerned website.

How to create an impact on your website ( Part 2)

2008-11-04T21:04:00.000-08:00

In the first part of this article, we have mentioned quite a few number of tips that can be used to enhance the impact of a website. These days we can be bombarded with all sorts of ready made website design package. However, we need to check by our self for improving the overall impact of the website. Keeping this point in mind, let us now continue to learn more tips which are as follows:

1) The text should be readable enough:
Here, I am trying to focus not on the type of words that you use but it is all about how the words appear on the page. Your words used must be surrounded with a lot of white space. When people read the content on your website, they should not strain their self by ducking their head to read the entire content. Also, see that you don’t use too much of dark backgrounds for your web pages as they make you feel as if you are limited to a small area and dark background pages look glooming and have a depressing effect on your mood. While using the text, see that the color of the text matches with the backgrounds. Certain colored background makes it difficult to read the text. You must keep one thing in mind that different browsers read colors differently. What looks great on your browser, could well be invisible on another. Hence, color of your text is very important.

2) Provide easy readable web pages:
Your web pages must be designed in such a way that the visitors can read them easily. This can be achieved by breaking it up into little “chunks”. You must provide vertical columns in order to divide the page vertically. You can also divide the webpage in the horizontal manner, by the use of headings and sub-headings. Also create a heading on each page by writing a short statement as a summary. Stick to one type of font for all your headings and sub-headings. You can also highlight the heading by making the whole sentence in bold.

3) Locate your navigation bar properly:
As per the western rule, people are accustomed to reading from left to right and from top to bottom. Also, people are accustomed to finding navigation bars on the left of web pages. It is highly recommendable to have a brief navigation bar along the bottom of the page. Use the navigation bar on every page so that your visitors can easily handle the web pages using the navigation bar.

4) Have a separate webpage for testimonials and private policy information:
For a business related website, it is essential to bring trust and confidence in the heart of the customers. You can achieve this by having a special page for policy and procedure. Also, in order to safeguard the customer’s interest, you must inform tem about how exactly you will protect their privacy. It is worth to have a separate page for mentioning these types of information in the visitor’s interest.

5) Use the right set of words:
This tip is the last tip in this article. However, it is the most important point that needs to keep track of. You must not commit any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. If you are wrong with regard to this fifth tip, then your efforts will go in vain, irrespective of whether you have achieved the first to the fourth tip as discussed in this article. Suppose a customer gets initially attracted by the appearance of your website but suddenly realizes that your website content is full of spelling mistakes, grammatical error and no proper punctuation marks used. The customer will never be impressed with such a situation. It will bring a bad effect on the person who owns the website. It will also indicate that the owner of the website appears to be careless, sloppy and unprofessional. If you cannot do it by yourself, you must then employ someone to write your webpage for you. written by Incite Software Pvt. Ltd.

How to create an impact on your website ( Part 1 )

2008-11-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

Websites are increasing in numbers day by day. At present, there are more than 35 million websites available. So, with so much of competition, you must focus on how your website will stand unique from others. Here, web designers play an important role in making one’s website outstanding from others. It is essential to concentrate on certain techniques whereby your website will easily catch someone’s eye. Your website should get noticed by the visitors, by giving them a sense of attraction. This can only happen if you follow the below mentioned tips.

1) Use proper color combination and size:

If you want your web pages to be outstanding then in that case you must select the right scheme of 3 or 4 colors for your web pages. Do not use too many flashing lights, colors, graphics etc. since it will be a source of distraction. You can compare this situation to a musical store who play’s loud music resulting into high heart rate of the listener. Use a very bright color (yellow, red or blue etc.) along with a limited amount of dull colors (example: black, white or black and grey etc.) This will help the visitor to focus his view point on to those areas where the color is used. By this technique, your readers will easily move around the entire page.

2) Use 3D effects:

Your self created background webpage can have a lively feeling if you give your webpage a 3D look. You first make the background slightly blurred and place any clearly focused item on top of it. It will create a 3D effect. This is enough to give that extra punch for your website.

3) Convey your main aim of the website:

Whether you own a business related website or it may be just a personal webpage, you must be able to express your main idea of your website. If you want people to visit and achieve the benefit of your website, then you must give them a genuine and effective reason to make them stay on your website. Every visitor would like to know what the website can store for them. Your website must offer them good information, entertainment, advice, be able to help them on an issue and your website can also link them to useful sites. So, even if one of their above needs touch their heart, they will be on your website for a longer time and they would always love to visit your website for more number of times.

4) Your home page should load quickly:

The downloading speed of any website is very important for keeping the visitorshooked to your website. At least try to ensure that your home page loads as quick as possible. Otherwise, if your homepage takes time to load, the visitor will skip to another website, irrespective whether your content on the webpage is good or not.Do not use too much of graphics on your web pages since they eat up the loading time of your website.

5) Take care while using graphics:

Your home page can become attractive if you use graphics. You must use graphics according to the type of the website. Example: If your website is a business oriented one, you cannot use cartoons on your home page. However, if you have a game related website, then using cartoon would be the best option as part of the image. Take the effect into consideration while creating an image and also choose an appropriate color.

A graphic which has a directional aspect should be fixed in order to point the eye towards the most important section of the page. If you use an image of a bird on the top left corner of your page, see that the bird is facing inward. In other words, its beak should be focusing towards the centre of the page and not away from it. Also, keep your navigation bars down the left side of your page. This method will help to constantly keep the navigation bars within the visitors field of vision.

Common mistakes which ca be avoided in website designing ( Part -2 )

2008-11-02T21:09:00.000-08:00

I already made you aware of the fact that just designing a website technically is not sufficient. You need to attract your visitors and turn them into customers by designing a website from the visitors and customers point of view. In the second part of this article, I now continue to highlight further mistakes which we tend to do while designing a website. They are as follows:

1) Avoid poor quality content:

Poor quality website content should not be tolerated. Your visitors will stick on to your website only if they get what they want. You must provide them with the right information and also give them good information of the product and all valuable details of the product. In other words, the content of your website should be of good quality. Do not go for just general description of a product.

2) The content of the website should be easily readable:

I have come across a website which contains heavily patterned background or lots of colors. Please avoid such ways. It might appear pretty to you but people will have to strain their eyes while trying to read the content on the website. If this happens, your visitors will run away. For example: You cannot expect your visitors to read a light blue text on a purple background. If visitors visit such a website, they may then hardly read it. On the other hand, they will immediately hunt for another website.

3) Navigation concept should be kept simple:

Never underestimate a navigation bar on your web page. If you make it the wrong way, you will land up confusing the visitors. Do not use a navigation bar only for the home page. Keep navigation consistent through out the site. You can do this by keeping the navigation bar on all landing pages so that the visitors do not have to hunt for it. Make sure that the navigation links are large and clearly labeled.

4) Do not understand grammar:

Your website is overall attractive but the content of your webpage has grammatical errors. Do you think your visitors will like this? Most of the visitors will not tolerate grammatical mistakes on your website. They will draw a conclusion that if your text on the website is not handled well then there might as well be other aspects of your business which might be off targeted and may not be handled well by you. So, these types of conclusions brought in the minds of the visitors will certainly keep them away from your website. You must give importance to your grammar content writing on your website. This includes spelling and punctuation too.

5) Do not use wrong title tag:

Your webpage title is important and you should design it properly. Most search engines give importance on the content of your title tag. If you set your web pages title to something totally unrelated to your website then your webpage will not benefit from potential search engine ranking. For example: If a web page has a title simply as “welcome” or “Thank you for visiting” then in that case, it will not help in claiming a good search engine ranking. Your title tag must reflect what your website is about.

Common mistakes which can be avoided in website designing ( Part – 1)

2008-11-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

A website can be considered as an information system which mainly depends on two major components called front end and back end. The front end components are made up of page layout, user interface, graphics, text and audio. The back end can be referred to the efficiency of the source code and the way it is organized. Also, invisible scripted functions and the server –side components that process the output from the front – end are important back end components. A web master individual takes the responsibility of handling the web development project. However, besides being aware of the key components of a website and even though we have responsible people to design the website, yet we must be aware of certain common mistakes that we ten to do during website designing and should avoid doing it. This article is not about how you design your website but this article will assist you to avoid many common mistakes that a novice and also an expert design may tend to make. The important points to be taken into consideration are as follows:

1) Your home page should touch the heart of the visitors:

The most important point while designing your website is to pay attention to the home page. Your home page should not look gloomy or it should not contain fonts which are tiny in size and are not matching with the background page of the website.

You must understand that your home page is the most important part of your website. Customers will judge your work on the basis of what they feel while visiting your home page. Your home page can be easily compared to the cover of a book. If the visitor is impressed with the cover of your book, he will then make an attempt to open and read the book further. In the same way if the visitor is impressed with your home page, he will then make an attempt to read other web pages of your website. If the visitor is not happy with your home page, you will then not see him reading your remaining web pages, however attractive and informative they may be.

2) Your product displayed on the website should be presentable:

Since the visitor gets attracted to your home page, he further decides to read other web pages containing information of a particular product that he may be interested. The visitor now thinks of purchasing a book through your website but he notices that the book displayed was poorly designed and he also did not like the way it was written. In such a case, would the visitor still buy it? So, even if the visitor has visited your webpage since they were interested in what you had to offer, yet it does not mean that the visitor will surely buy the product. Besides your homepage, you must also have a good product designed website which your customer will find attractive and will stay there with a positive purchasing attitude.

3) The website should download quickly:

It is known of the fact that normally visitors only wait for about six to eight seconds for a site to download. If this does not happen, he will then skip on to some other website.

So, even if your product is good but if your webpage takes time to download the entire picture and the information of the product, he will not wait for a long time. Even if a page takes 30 seconds, he may not like it. Instead, he will loose his patience and switch on to some other website which can serve his true purpose. Also, avoid too much of graphic oriented web pages which take time to download.

Online Shopping and eBay

2008-09-05T02:37:00.001-07:00

he world of online shopping has become very sophisticated, and quite safe. While the possibilities of getting scammed online still do exist, the risk is no greater than going to the local store and getting your credit card number stolen there. Here is an introduction to the vast world of online shopping.

What is 'RSS'? How Do RSS Feeds Work?

2008-09-05T02:36:00.002-07:00

Also known as "Really Simple Syndication", RSS is the best way to satisfy your info-junkie cravings.

P2P: Peer to Peer File Sharing, Downloading, and Legalities

2008-09-05T02:36:00.001-07:00

It is the most participated activity on the internet today: uploading and downloading media. Songs, movies, tv shows, software... all of these items are available on the web. Yes, much of it is copyrighted, and yes, many people abuse peer-to-peer file sharing. But it has legitimate uses, too.

IM and Instant Messenger Basics

2008-09-05T02:35:00.002-07:00

Instant messaging, or "IM", is the combination of chat and email. Although often considered a distraction at corporate offices, IM can be a very useful communication tool for both business and social purposes.

Email Basics

2008-09-05T02:35:00.001-07:00

The world of electronic mail is daunting for someone new, but it is very learnable, and you don't even have to be a master typist to be a good emailer.

Internet Terminology and Acronyms

2008-09-05T02:34:00.002-07:00

You see strange expressions like "SSH" and "TCP/IP" in your new web travels. People talk about "AFK" and "TTYL", but they don't explain themselves. Well, friends, About.com can help. Here is a resource of acronyms and terminology for you. Even better: this stuff is actually interesting to just read about on its own.

How to Search the Internet (And Not Get Frustrated)

2008-09-05T02:34:00.001-07:00

With thousands of web pages and files added everyday, the internet and the web are daunting to search. While catalogs like Google and Yahoo! help, what's even more important is the user mindset... how to approach sifting through billions of possible choices to find what you need.

Do You Know How to Use Your Browser?

2008-09-05T02:33:00.000-07:00

When it comes to their Internet Explorer or Firefox, most people just know click, type, enter, refresh, and back. But there is so much more that you can do with your browser.

Second Generation Searching on the Web

2008-09-05T02:14:00.000-07:00

This tutorial covers some of the more innovative search engine services on the Web. It includes a group of search services that make use of technology that organizes search results by peer ranking, clustered results by concept, and user behavior or rankings. This is in contrast to the more long-standing method of term relevancy ranking. To remain competitive, most search engines today are second generation tools. The newer type of results ranking usually works in addition to term ranking and looks at "off the page" information to determine the retrieval and order of your search results. Search engines that employ this alternative may be thought of as second generation search services. For example:

Google ranks by the number of links from the highest number of pages ranked high by the service
Clusty organizes its clustered results by keyword and/or concept
URL.com offers changeable search results based on user voting

Here are a few of the trends to watch with second-generation services:

The human element: concept processing. Second generation services such as Brainboost and SurfWax apply different kinds of concept processing to a search statement to determine the probable intent of a search. This is often accomplished by the use of human generated indexes. With these services, the burden of coming up with precise or extensive terminology is shifted from the user to the engine. These services are therefore taking on the role of thesauri.
The human element: "horizontal" presentation of results. Most search tools return results in one long, vertical list. In contrast to this, there is a growing group of search tools that use concept processing to return results in a horizontal organization. With these tools, you can first review concept categories retrieved by your search before examining the results within particular categories. This can make it easier to zero in on the aspects of your topic that interest you. Examples of these tools include Clusty, Dogpile and Exalead.
The human element: peer ranking. Search services such as Google derive their results from the behavior and judgment of millions of Website maintainers.
The human element: voting or searcher behavior. Search services such as URL.com offers changeable results based on the votes of searchers. Eurekster Swickis are custom search engines whose results are influenced by searcher selection of sites from the results lists.

Internet Architecture

2008-08-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

The Internet is by definition a meta-network, a constantly changing collection of thousands of individual networks intercommunicating with a common protocol.
The Internet's architecture is described in its name, a short from of the compound word "inter-networking". This architecture is based in the very specification of the standard TCP/IP protocol, designed to connect any two networks which may be very different in internal hardware, software, and technical design. Once two networks are interconnected, communication with TCP/IP is enabled end-to-end, so that any node on the Internet has the near magical ability to communicate with any other no matter where they are. This openness of design has enabled the Internet architecture to grow to a global scale.
In practice, the Internet technical architecture looks a bit like a multi-dimensional river system, with small tributaries feeding medium-sized streams feeding large rivers. For example, an individual's access to the Internet is often from home over a modem to a local Internet service provider who connects to a regional network connected to a national network. At the office, a desktop computer might be connected to a local area network with a company connection to a corporate Intranet connected to several national Internet service providers. In general, small local Internet service providers connect to medium-sized regional networks which connect to large national networks, which then connect to very large bandwidth networks on the Internet backbone. Most Internet service providers have several redundant network cross-connections to other providers in order to ensure continuous availability.
The companies running the Internet backbone operate very high bandwidth networks relied on by governments, corporations, large organizations, and other Internet service providers. Their technical infrastructure often includes global connections through underwater cables and satellite links to enable communication between countries and continents. As always, a larger scale introduces new phenomena: the number of packets flowing through the switches on the backbone is so large that it exhibits the kind of complex non-linear patterns usually found in natural, analog systems like the flow of water or development of the rings of Saturn.
Each communication packet goes up the hierarchy of Internet networks as far as necessary to get to its destination network where local routing takes over to deliver it to the addressee. In the same way, each level in the hierarchy pays the next level for the bandwidth they use, and then the large backbone companies settle up with each other. Bandwidth is priced by large Internet service providers by several methods, such as at a fixed rate for constant availability of a certain number of megabits per second, or by a variety of use methods that amount to a cost per gigabyte. Due to economies of scale and efficiencies in management, bandwidth cost drops dramatically at the higher levels of the architecture.
Computer History
Internet fax.
Computer and Internet

INTERNET MARKETING

2008-08-07T03:57:00.000-07:00

The Five Levels of Permission Marketing

1. Intravenous. Your doctor has your permission to put whatever she wants into your arm, and then charge you for the treatment and expect you to pay. The marketer who has this level of permission can make buying decisions on behalf of the buyer. The only downside is if you mess it up, you'll lose the permission. Automatic replenishment of the spring water in your office or the oil in your home are examples of this. Why do people submit to this type of marketing? To save time, to save money, because some people don't like to make a choice, and to avoid stock outs.

2. Points. Airline frequent flier miles and credit card points are examples of this level of permission marketing. People opt-in to these programs because of the benefits you give them. They give you permission to track their purchases and to send them special offers based on their purchase patterns.

3. Personal relationships. This form of permission ranks behind "points" because it doesn't scale. [In 2008, I actually think that things like blogging and social networking might allow this to scale better, maybe making it #2. - Mike Volpe] This is the form of marketing used in very large transactions, like on Wall Street and on Madison Avenue. When you have a personal relationship, you have permission to ask questions, see if someone is interested in a new service, and recommend other products. Again, if you mess it up, you'll lose the permission, so be smart.

4. Brand trust. This is the type of trust that outbound interruption marketers aspire to hold (it is scary that they only aspire to stage #2!). Brand trust is dramatically overrated. It's extraordinarily expensive to create, takes a very long time to develop, is hard to measure, and is harder still to manipulate. You can use brand trust to create brand extensions, or cross sell other products. But the first time you break the trust by not keeping the customer's best interest at heart, you'll damage the value of your brand greatly.

5. Situation. This is the permission you get when a customer calls your 800 number or asks a store clerk for advice, etc. Compared to TV ads or other interruption marketing, this situation gives the average marketer a lot more options. Remember that your employees who deal with customers and prospects are the tool to use for situational permission. McDonald's has generated billions with the situational permission phrase of "Do you want fries with that?". The question later became "Do you want to Super Size that?", and maybe they ruined their brand value by not keeping their customer's health in mind, leading to the movie "Super Size Me".
Computer Word

INTERNET HISTORY

2008-08-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

1957

The USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. In response,the United States forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within theDepartment of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

1962

RAND Paul Baran, of the RAND Corporation (a government agency), was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force to do a study on how it could maintain its command and control over its missiles and bombers, after a nuclear attack. This was to be a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, decentralized so that if any locations (cities) in the U.S. were attacked, the military could still have control of nuclear arms for a counter-attack.

Baran's finished document described several ways to accomplish this. His final proposal was a packet switched network.

"Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the forwarding of these packets from one computer to another computer until the information arrives at its final destination computer. This was crucial to the realization of a computer network. If packets are lost at any given point, the message can be resent by the originator."

1968

ARPA awarded the ARPANET contract to BBN. BBN had selected a Honeywell minicomputer as the base on which they would build the switch. The physical network was constructed in 1969, linking four nodes: University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. The network was wired together via 50 Kbps circuits.

1972

The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was renamed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA)

ARPANET was currently using the Network Control Protocol or NCP to transfer data. This allowed communications between hosts running on the same network.

1973

Development began on the protocol later to be called TCP/IP, it was developed by a group headed by Vinton Cerf from Stanford and Bob Kahn from DARPA. This new protocol was to allow diverse computer networks to interconnect and communicate with each other.

1974

First Use of term Internet by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in paper on Transmission Control Protocol.

1976

Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allowed coaxial cable to move data extremely fast. This was a crucial component to the development of LANs.

The packet satellite project went into practical use. SATNET, Atlantic packet Satellite network, was born. This network linked the United States with Europe.Surprisingly, it used INTELSAT satellites that were owned by a consortium of countries and not exclusively the United States government.

UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

The Department of Defense began to experiment with the TCP/IP protocol and soon decided to require it for use on ARPANET.

1979

USENET (the decentralized news group network) was created by Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at University of North Carolina, and programmers Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. It was based on UUCP.

The Creation of BITNET, by IBM, "Because its Time Network", introduced the "store and forward" network. It was used for email and listservs.

1981

National Science Foundation created backbone called CSNET 56 Kbps network for institutions without access to ARPANET. Vinton Cerf proposed a plan for an inter-network connection between CSNET and the ARPANET.

1983

Internet Activities Board (IAB) was created in 1983.

On January 1st, every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely.

The University of Wisconsin created Domain Name System (DNS). This allowed packets to be directed to a domain name, which would be translated by the server database into the corresponding IP number. This made it much easier for people to access other servers, because they no longer had to remember numbers.

1984

The ARPANET was divided into two networks: MILNET and ARPANET. MILNET was to serve the needs of the military and ARPANET to support the advanced research component, Department of Defense continued to support both networks.

Upgrade to CSNET was contracted to MCI. New circuits would be T1 lines,1.5 Mbps which is twenty-five times faster than the old 56 Kbps lines. IBM would provide advanced routers and Merit would manage the network. New network was to be called NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), and old lines were to remain called CSNET.

1985

The National Science Foundation began deploying its new T1 lines, which would be finished by 1988.

1986

The Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF was created to serve as a forum for technical coordination by contractors for DARPA working on ARPANET, US Defense Data Network (DDN), and the Internet core gateway system.

1987

BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN), another work of the National Science Foundation.

1988

Soon after the completion of the T1 NSFNET backbone, traffic increased so quickly that plans immediately began on upgrading the network again.

1990

(Updated 8/2001) Merit, IBM and MCI formed a not for profit corporation called ANS, Advanced Network & Services, which was to conduct research into high speed networking. It soon came up with the concept of the T3, a 45 Mbps line. NSF quickly adopted the new network and by the end of 1991 all of its sites were connected by this new backbone.

While the T3 lines were being constructed, the Department of Defense disbanded the ARPANET and it was replaced by the NSFNET backbone. The original 50Kbs lines of ARPANET were taken out of service.

Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community.

1991

CSNET (which consisted of 56Kbps lines) was discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations.

The NSF established a new network, named NREN, the National Research and Education Network. The purpose of this network is to conduct high speed networking research. It was not to be used as a commercial network, nor was it to be used tosend a lot of the data that the Internet now transfers.

1992

Internet Society is chartered.

World-Wide Web released by CERN.

NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)

1993

InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: directory and database services (by AT&T), registration services (by Network Solutions Inc.), and information services (by General Atomics/CERFnet).

Marc Andreessen and NCSA and the University of Illinois develops a graphical user interface to the WWW, called "Mosaic for X".

1994

No major changes were made to the physical network. The most significant thing that happened was the growth. Many new networks were added to the NSF backbone.Hundreds of thousands of new hosts were added to the INTERNET during this time period.

Pizza Hut offers pizza ordering on its Web page.

First Virtual, the first cyberbank, opens.

ATM (Asynchronous Transmission Mode, 145Mbps) backbone is installed on NSFNET.

1995

The National Science Foundation announced that as of April 30, 1995 it would no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone. The National Science Foundationcontracted with four companies that would be providers of access to the NSF backbone (Merit). These companies would then sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies.

$50 annual fee is imposed on domains, excluding .edu and .gov domains which are still funded by the National Science Foundation.

1996

Most Internet traffic is carried by backbones of independent ISPs, including MCI, AT&T, Sprint, UUnet, BBN planet, ANS, and more.

Currently the Internet Society, the group that controls the INTERNET, is trying to figure out new TCP/IP to be able to have billions of addresses, rather than the limited system of today. The problem that has arisen is that it is not known how both the old and the new addressing systems will be able to work at the same time during a transition period.

(Author's Note: The content of this guide was compiled in 1997. Obviously much has happened since this time. Please seek other resources for newer advancements.)

S4 sumit

$um!+ P@d#an

written by peter