Naturenet
A brief history
N
aturenet went fully online on 1 January 1996 after two months
of preparation and a few test pages (so, yes, we always claim to have been online
since 1995). 
Sample report from BBC Wildlife Magazine, 1996
showing what things were like 'back in the day'. The original idea was
simply to have a few pages of nature conservation information and a big index
of places to go in the countryside. Volunteers gathered and typed in the information
in the sites index, the body of which was installed by Summer 1996 for England
only. After that, we decided to reconfigure the whole thing before doing the
rest of the UK. In fact, we never did complete the index as nobody really used
it, and the nature conservation and other bits which came along proved to be
far more useful. So the index remains incomplete to this day but the other indices
have gone from strength to strength - there are now about 300 pages on Naturenet
and the number keeps increasing.
Expenses (like new software, server costs when they occur, fixing
this poor old PC, and so on) are and always have been paid mostly out of the
pockets of the organisers! Naturenet is not affiliated to or representing any
of the bodies it catalogues,
but is an independent enterprise.
When we first started, getting online was a haphazard affair.
Your Naturenet editor discovered that there was an American guy a few villages
away who had some sort of internet stuff and something called a BBS (never did
find out what that was) in his garage. After a guided tour of the garage and
a bit of discussion, this guy agreed that we could dial-up from his system in
exchange for some money, thus saving having to make phonecalls at national rates
to hugely expensive providers - it usually cost about £25/month in those
days, not including national rate call charges. He was one of the first ISPs
in the country, I suppose.
Our first website was attached to a home page, at http://www.dungeon,com/~chat.
This was satisfactory so long as we remained small, but as interest grew we
became too large to remain there. In April 1996 Naturenet was offered a new
home by Webscape, and after some experimenting, and much patience by our new
hosts, this went live on 25 May 1996 at http://www.garrison.co,uk/naturenet
(now no longer in existence). As of 19 August 1997 we were donated our own domain
name at https://naturenet.net,
which was generously organised and provided by our frighteningly tolerant hosts,
Webscape. From that time onwards things have remained pretty stable and we expect
to keep this address for a good long time yet.
| During 1996 we built up a hit rate of
between 100 and 1000 per week, which is still increasing now. Over 1997
we accumulated about 10,000 hits. |
| In 1997 Naturenet was awarded the Princes'
Award for the Best Audiovisuals on Europe's Environment. We got a trophy,
a trip to Copenhagen, and lots of glory (but no money). See here
for further details. |
| June 1998:
We were made a very welcome present of a total redesign by Vet Design. The
colours changed, and there were a few other changes too, but they're too
boring and nerdy to go into here. We've had changes of style since, but
many of the Vet Design changes have survived until this day, particularly
this font (Verdana) and the white page background. You can see what the
old style was like in our old logo in the picture below. |
| July 1998:
New hitcounter from Webtracker, new mailing list from Onelist (which became
Egroups and later Yahoo Groups) called Ask
The Ranger. |
| November 1998:
We pass 20,000 recorded hits to the front page. |
June 2000:
We register https://naturenet.org.uk to stop anyone else snaffling
it. there's nothing there, so don't bother going there. |
July 2000:
We pass 50,000 recorded hits to the front page. |
October 2000:
Server stats survey from Webscape suggests that our hit counter (which
is not based on our own server) is actually underestimating our visitor
numbers by a factor of 8.42. If true, this means we've actually passed
500,000 hits. |
May 2001:
We pass 75,000 recorded hits to the front page. |
May 2001:
Sponsorship agreement with Countryside
Jobs Service. |
August 2001:
Naturenet is shortlisted for Yell.com/Awards. |
| October 2001:
Naturenet is runner up in Community section of Yell Awards, second only
to the overall winners, some blokes from Scotland. We get to eat dinner
in some distinguished company. See details and photos here.
|
| August 2003:
Naturenet begins migration from Frontpage to Dreamweaver. No sign to users
(usually) but much frantic nerd-work behind the scenes. |
July 2004:
we find, by accident, that whoever used to own naturenet.co.uk had forgotten
to re-register it! Hooray! We snap it up. The fools - we'd have paid for
that. |
Sept 2004:
We pass 250,000 hits to front page - new server stats suggest that multiplier
is still in operation, and thus real hit numbers are in excess of 2 million.
|
| Pinkeye
Graphics gives Naturenet a much-needed makeover. |
Pages marked with this symbol are exclusively written for
Naturenet