Monday, January 27, 2014

BellyDance.org 15th Anniversary

It occurred to me just a few weeks ago that we were coming up on an important anniversary that happens this week. On January 31st 1999 I purchased the domain name BellyDance.org.  Within weeks BellyDance.org went live. 

The International Academy of Middle Eastern Dance aka IAMED did have an internet presence prior to 1999. In the early days of the internet there were small internet companies that for a small fee would add you to there site. In this case their was company called Web Access that taught basic website design in the San Fernando Valley. I was living in North Hollywood at the time and my boyfriend Terry took a couple of classes from the company.  We set up the original website under WebAccess.com/bellydance (no need to look at it, it's long gone and the company sold off their domain name years ago). The site was several pages and contained all the basic information about IAMED. I only have vague memories of the original design but it was very rudimentary and by today's standards would look very dated. 

Since 1999 we have grown from just a few pages to many, many pages of information, videos, store and more.  Since it's inception it has consistently been one of the most popular belly dance websites on the internet. 

It seems quite strange that it has been 15 years. Didn't we just celebrate the 10th anniversary?  

Over the years BellyDance.org has gone through several re-designs and will likely go through another one by the end of this year making for an even more exciting website experience including more articles, reviews, lots of beautiful photos and my blog. 


Mychelle
Photo by Javier Padilla