I have been interviewed today by Agatha Kubalski
Chicago Small Business Strategies Examiner

Goran Paunovic, creative director at Art Version, a Chicagoland graphic design and web development agency located in Northfield, is a long-time user of Openforum.com. "This is not your typical forum, it's really a gathering of usable information, that particularly small business owners can find useful and learn from," says Paunovic.

Originally launched in 2007, Open Forum is an online forum and networking hub for small business owners created by American Express. The site re-launched this past summer and is full of resources including insights, ideas, and the opportunity to connect and network with other businesses.

"The site is a tremendous tool, but you have to know how to use it. You have to reach out and connect with people. Similar to any other social media tool, you can't just sit around and not participate," says Paunovic.

Although the site was initially designed exclusively for OPEN card holders, American Express recently entered into a strategic partnership with LinkedIn to make Open Forum and its resources accessible to professionals on the business networking site, whether they're card members or not....

Read full article at Examiner

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Not that long ago, back in 1991 first website was born. We are living and witnessing very fast technological evolution right now,  it's incredible how many things we take for granted nowadays.  With all these shiny new gadgets that are available everywhere, and all these flashy, intelligent and interactive websites, with dozen program languages available, it's very easy to overlook the facts and recognize the history. So let's go back to the history of the first world wide web for a bit.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer and computer scientist, published what is considered to be officially the first website in August 1991. Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication (which had been carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer, such as interactive CD-ROM design).

What did a first website look like?

Many websites are written in a markup language called HTML, and early versions of HTML were very basic, only giving a website's basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different from existing forms of communication - users could easily navigate to other pages by following hyperlinks from page to page.  As the Web and web design progressed, the markup language changed to become more complex and flexible, giving the ability to add objects like images and tables to a page. Features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layout is commonly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like W3C further changed and enhanced the way the Web is made. As times change, websites are changing the code on the inside and visual design on the outside with ever-evolving programs and utilities.

With the progression of the Web, tens of thousands of web design companies have been established around the world (and we are one of them!) to serve the growing demand for such work.

So, where was that First Website hosted?

This NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee and became the world's first Web server.  That computer cost small fortune back in those days, and it had a lot less processing speed and memory than what right now is sitting in your pocket inside of your cell phone.

I would like to express my gratitude to Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau and all the People that made Work Wide Web better place.

Credits: Wikipedia.org, W3.org, info.cern.ch

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