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A Brief History of the BTG (Part I)Dateline: 17th November, 2005Some time in 1995 I took my first steps on the Web. Well, not really. Like many first-timers, I'd signed up with Compuserve and stayed within its comforting arms, never venturing to press that button which said The Internet. Actually, at the time I had only a 9.6K modem and I'd heard, in one of the Compuserve forums, that it would be far too slow for the Net. But there were personal sites even on Compuserve and, looking at them, I decided I would like to make my mark on this new medium. However I didn't want to do a "this is me and this is my dog" site (although I did have a dog), so I decided to set up a site about my passion at the time, school productions. There wasn't anything on Compuserve which covered this interest, and so the School Show Page was born. I'd actually written a book about directing school shows but no publisher was interested ("We found your book very interesting, but unfortunately it doesn't fit into our plans at the moment...."), so I decided to more or less put that online. It was, I think, an interesting site - in the words of Miss Jean Brodie, "For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like" - but it was a design disaster. I squirm with embarrassment when I remember it! By 1996 I was all too aware of its design shortcomings and of the fact that I was rapidly using up my free webspace, so I decided to migrate to a "real" ISP. This was Demon, still one for the leading ISPs in the UK. I'm still with them! The School Show Page continued to grow and in February 1997 I received an email from a company called General Internet which was planning a network of websites on a vast range of subjects, and they invited me to join them, producing a site on British Theatre. They'd seen the SSP, liked it and asked if I'd like to undergo training - and they offered to pay! It wasn't much: in fact, it didn't cover my ISP costs and phone bills for the year, but I was flattered and said yes. It wasn't until April that they told me that I wasn't just training: I was also being tested. I had, however, passed the test and, in April 1997 the Mining Company (for so it became) British Theatre site went live and I was the official Mining Company Guide to British Theatre. The company - and the site - continued to grow, and it changed its name to About.com and I continued as the About.com Guide to British Theatre until September 2001 when, just after the company was bought by publishing group Primedia, I and some 300 others were sacked. The company had grown to 900 sites and they had decided to let us go "to concentrate on their core business". Essentially what they meant was they wanted to do was concentrate on the sites that could be most easily "monetized". However, they did say that they would not hold us to the clause in the contract which said that we would not set up a site on the same subject for six months. Not that I intended to: indeed, I breathed a sigh of relief for About had become so demanding that most of my spare time - I was still teaching Drama at the time, and running the SSP - was devoted to the site. "At last," I thought, "I can have a life!" But it was not to be. I was deluged with emails asking me to continue the site, some from quite influential figures in theatre, and so the idea of the British Theatre Guide was born. I produced a new design, migrated most of the About content to it, found a new host, bought the domain name, and, with the help of some readers of the About site (most of whom are still Newletter subscribers to this day), set up a beta version of the new site on 5th November, 2001. The beta-testers gave it a thorough going-over and I made numerous alterations and finally, on 17th November 2001, the BTG was revealed to the world!
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