How many of us can recall the first website we ever made or a blog we published Online ?
First impression might not be the Last impression, in case of your first website.
The first website is rather the Motivational factor. You learn from your mistakes, you tend to make things better the next time you make a new website or upgrade your existing first website.
My first website ever Online was on Geocities.com. The year was 1997 when I first published a website Online. The Domain Names could be registered at $35 per year, or as a great discount for $34.95 🙂 at Register.com or NetworkSolutions.com or MelbourneIT.com.
Bob Parsons with GoDaddy.com Super Bowl Commericals Team
It was way before Bob Parsons started directly promoting GoDaddy.com and the GoDaddy.com girls started impressing on TV commercials.
Bob Parsons with GoDaddy.com Girls
Well its not due to the Godaddy Girls, Godaddy.com grew by being quicker, cheaper, offering 24/7 customer support, and creating an upsell system that offered services to significantly increase revenue.
Geocities was Free Website, Free Hosting, No Domain Name, but a good web presence with the Best SEO results, remember the Search Engine was also Yahoo! at that time, not Google.
Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999, near the peak of the dotcom bubble, in a stock deal valued at roughly $4.6 billion. But the rise of alternative services quickly spelled the end of GeoCities’ prominence.
Geocities had tools and many assisting plugins available and they were pretty decent if we compare to what we have even today.
A posting on a Yahoo Help page for GeoCities on April 2009 said the service was no longer accepting new customers and that it will be closing later this year, with more details about how individuals can save their data coming this summer.
In a statement Yahoo had said:
“We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways,” Yahoo said in a statement.
“As part of Yahoo’s ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers and results for advertisers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others.”
Add this to the deal Yahoo made with Mark Cuban to buy Broadcast.com, also in the late 1990’s, and that equals about $10 Billion that Yahoo gave away.