There’s really been no news about what you have to see as a major anniversary coming up: 20 years of commercial web sites. By commercial I think you have to consider the web site to be designed in some way to generate revenue for an organization as a benefit of the web site.
This would also mean that this is the 20th Anniversary Year of Commercial Web Developers – those that actually create web sites for others for commercial purposes. Although we’d like to say that Kessler Freedman, Inc., has been around since the beginning, the truth is we started a little later, in 1995.
Obviously the industry has changed a lot and by the lack of news, I think it’s also clear the industry doesn’t spend much time on reflection of its past. It has been reported that by the end of 1993, there were 623 web sites. Some of those were not experimental in nature, or institutional information clearinghouses, but were actual commercial efforts. It’s actually a bit surprising that there’s no effort to claim the longest running commercial web site at this point, it would seem to have some promotional mileage to it.