Stephen Spry

My first web site, Australia's Careers Online, was launched in July of 1995, and was based on my (self) published "Ideas for Careers" teaching masters which had been sold to Aussie schools for the previous 4 years.

Careers OnLine was the very first Australian based career information web site to be launched on the Internet. Seriously :) Today it still serves between 50 and 80,000 visitors every month of the year!

I think it's pretty incredible that I've been able to help that many people every month for the past 12 years through the Internet!

Back in '95 I intended to make a living by selling "space" at what to be a "virtual careers fair". However, 1995/96 was very early days for the Internet, and there was a lot of doubt and uncertainty about the 'net as an advertising medium. So it was a hard sell, with little actual reward (financially). That meant I had to look further afield to get general web design work.

I lived in the western suburbs of Sydney Australia at the time... so after a fair bit of head scratching I started "chatting" to local businesses about getting online.

Ahhh... 1996 - when my first 14.4k modem cost me about 400 bucks... when fax machines were the size of copiers... and mobile phones were like bricks!

There weren't many web designers around at the time, and this whole Internet thing was so new that you spent an extraordinary amount of time simply "teaching" people about what the Internet was about, and how it could help them in business.

I made presentations to local chambers of Commerce, to trade Association conferences, to all sorts of people, to tell them about this new fangled technology that was known as the world wide web!

And while people were interested in this phenomenon... they didn't want to part with any cash on something that wasn't "proven"... and was probably only a fly by night thing anyway!

LOL!

I discovered very early on the pressures facing businesses when deciding what to spend their advertising budget on... and a web site wasn't anywhere on the list!

I needed to demonstrate how the Internet could be useful to LOCAL businesses... Let's face it... what point was it to a local business getting enquiries from the other side of the world???

So "SydWest" was born - a site which (between 1996 and 2001) focussed on providing local people with information about what was going on in their very own backyard!

Sydwest was one of the very first local web sites on the 'net - ever!

It gave me an opportunity to cold call any business in the area, and get to speak to the owner really easily... I simply asked "I'm compiling a free directory of local businesses... so what's your URL?"

Most receptionists had NO idea of what I was talking about, so I often got through to the owner to talk to them about it... and explain what the net was... etc etc etc.

Thankfully, I got some good work out of it at the time, and am still in touch with, and doing work for, some of the clients I picked up from way back then.

Interesting that with any new form of technology, you get all sorts of people trying to flog it... and they make all sorts of very weird claims in the process!

The same STILL applies now... people flogging web sites come out with all sorts of crap about what a business needs to make it on the web.

So it seemed back in 1997 that I was still going to be teaching... only this time, teaching people about the 'net, about what web sites are, and what was really needed.

Time for another web site to add to my stable... The Small Business Support Network was launched in mid 1997 to help people learn the correct way of doing business online.

More than 10 years later it's still doing it's job... and still providing opportunities for registered businesses to network with other businesses.

I'm having ongoing concerns with indexing and traffic fluctuations from Google that I just can't seem to get my head around. This means that sometimes this site helps 40,000 people a month... and other times, only 5,000.

Yep... we've got a lot more to cover before we even get to the 21st Century in this Spry Chronology.

And I'm documenting all of that over at my brand new site which attempts to centralise the information contained on my ever growing network!

Please head on over there to find out all about Come On Aussie (Oi Oi Oi), my experiences with Google's Adsense, and lots more.