My New Website -- One among Billions

As many of my blog fans have reminded me, it’s been awhile since I posted a Post. Procrastination and a few softball games and motorcycle rides notwithstanding, over the past few months I have been very busy (e.g., the typical and customary University tasks, the post-publication shepparding of four books published early in 2009, and the writing of the first draft of the 15 chapters of a new, under contract textbook with my co-author, Dr. Bill Lambos). I know many of us in today’s society have redefined the term “multi-tasking,” yet at times my recent multi-tasking felt like it was on steroids. Nonetheless, with the tremendous professional assistance of a good friend and colleague, Ms. Barbara Lofrisco, I now have a new website – new yet still at the same URL: emenerbooks.com. Barb did an excellent job (and as part of our two-person team, I did my job: I asked the many pesky questions such as “How about if…?” “Why? and “Why not?” Hey, somebody had to do it…!)

In doing some recent research for my and Dr. Lambos’ textbook – regarding the impact of electronic technology and the Internet on loving relationships and couples and marriage counseling – I found some interesting data regarding “websites.” First, however, let’s define and discuss the term. For example, according to wikipedia, a website (or “web site”) is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one web server, usually accessible via the Internet. A web page is a document, typically written in (X)HTML, that is almost always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the web server to display in the user’s web browser. And, all publicly accessible websites are seen collectively as constituting the “World Wide Web.”

The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a common root URL called the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different parts of the site.

Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their content. Examples of subscription sites include many business sites, parts of many news sites, academic journal sites, gaming sites, message boards, Web-based e-mail, services, social networking websites, and sites providing real-time stock market data. Because they require authentication to view the content they are technically an Intranet site. And by now you may be thinking about how smart Bill is? (No, not true. Remember, I was the one asking Barb the pesky questions.)

According to about.com, in 2005, Google reported they indexed 8,058,044,651 web pages on the Internet. This did not include the millions of pages they did not index. Today, the number of Google-indexed pages is estimated to be closer to 9 billion and thousands of new websites go live every single day (like mine did last night). Royal Pingdom reports that it was 6 years from when the first website appeared in December 1990 before the Internet had 100,000 websites. In 2008, Royal Pingdom estimated there were more than 162 million websites (not web pages). Yikes!

I’ll be back soon with another Post. And in the meantime, to help you find my new website among the 162 million others, here’s a link to it: emenerbooks.com.

Enjoy!

Bill