Sometimes People Amaze Me

A friend of ours sent a link to our alumni forum. It was a simple link about A page depicting the Time Line  of India. I got curious and started poking around. I have already spent more than an hour and half on it and I thought I should bring this story to the world. What impressed me most was this chronology page. It describes how, a dedicated family slowly built up a web site from a few pages over a decade to 4.5 million page views a month.

Chronology of Development of Kamat’s Potpourri

• Started as a home page on AOL sometime in later part of  year 1995. The first attraction was tour of India in photo stubs.
• Registered the domain Kamat.com at the behest of B.G.Mahesh in Aug 1996.
• Moved to a new location at IAOL in Nov 1997. Added a search engine. Popularity jumps to over hundred accesses/day.
• Due to delay in publishing of the KalaRanga CD-ROM, started to publish the contents online. Accesses jump to over a thousand a day. (June 1998)
• We add a Kannada Section (Aug. 98) in Kannada Script, by popular request.
• The popularity of the site increases to over 2000 page views/day (October ’98) and we decide to keep the site free of advertisements.
• A review by the Arts and Letters daily, more listings at Yahoo! and a Editor’s Pick Listing at Bharat-Ek-Khoj propel daily readership to above 5000. Thank you viewers and reviewers! (January 1999)
• CHIP magazine names Kamat’s Potpourri as one of India’s best websites. (February 1999)
• Moved to new hosting provider HostPro, and added PICTURESeach
• Kamat’s Potpourri’s monthly viewership exceeds 150,000 (February 2000) after the popularity of our Rangoli section
• Kamat’s Potpourri featured on Tech TV (July 2000) (excerpt)
• Added banner advertising (Sept. 2000)
• Number of pictures in Kamat House of Pictures crosses 4000 (February 2001)
• Monthly page views cross a million (June 2001)
• Number of pictures in Kamat House of Pictures crosses 6000 (October 2001)
• The capacity of the server is increased ten times (December 2001) due to increased traffic and content
• Number of pictures in Kamat House of Pictures crosses 7000 (May 2002)
• Amma’s Column is started (May 21, 2002)
• Rediff, Wired, BBC, ScriptingNews link to Kamat.com registering our highest traffic — 1.65 million page views during the month (August 2002)
• Number of pictures in Kamat House of Pictures crosses 8000 (April 2003)
• The viewership exceeds 2 million pages per month (May 2003)
• Kannada Weblog is started (May 13, 2003)
• Added non-intrusive text advertisements via Bottom-of-the-Page technology (September 2003)
• The viewership for December 2003 crosses 3 million for the first time. (January 2004)
• Number of pictures in Kamat House of Pictures exceeds 9000 (April 2004)
• Number of pictures that can be searched in Kamat House of Pictures reaches 10,000 (October 2004)
• Number of pageviews exceeds 4.5 million (December 2005)