20 years of the website - and some companies still don't have one
The 20th Anniversary of the first website going live is today (6 August), and while there are countless websites in existence, many companies still don’t have one, as Christ Winstanley, vice president of BaseKit explains.
On the 6th August 1991, the first website in the world went live. It was produced by CERN to help demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web. I’m sure that not even Tim Berners-Lee himself could have predicted that in a mere 20 years, the use of the internet would have exploded so dramatically, with billions and billions of websites now accessible. Now, even as new tools become available to allow people to access the Internet in different ways, the website is the heart of the Internet.
However, despite the billions of sites out there, there are still many companies around the world who still don’t have one of their own. At BaseKit, we help companies easily create, host and manage their own websites, and we’re seeing massive growth in the number of websites created from developing markets across Latin America. For businesses, having a website can be the difference between success and failure. Recent research showed that over 82% of small businesses now see that having a website is a good thing for their business and that 66% see the company website as more important than their physical presence.
At just 20 years old, the website has come a long way. As Internet access begins to spread across developing countries, and new tools are created that make it even easier for individuals and companies to create their own sites, we believe that it has an incredibly bright future ahead of it, and will evolve to have uses we cannot even begin to imagine at this stage.