"In the summer of 1995, I began planning for my wedding which was to take place the following summer. As part of the wedding preparations I had the bright (though hardly original) idea of creating personalized invitations and programs. My fiancee (now my happily married wife), who handled most of the other wedding preparations, thought this was a brilliant idea! Well, okay... she didn't really care one way or the other. Anyway, at that point I was undecided on which way to go: make them or buy them? So I figured that if I ever did get around to creating the invitations or programs I would at the very least need some decent clip art to put on them. So began my hunt for wedding-related clip art.
"Not wanting the hassle of finding and scanning images or searching for and buying CD clip art collections (I had no CD-ROM drive anyway), I turned to the internet. To my chagrin I could find no web site which offered up much in the way of wedding clip art. So I began the slow process of collecting GIF images of anything associated with weddings (including pictures of bells, hearts, flowers, churches, etc.) from numerous sources on the web as well as from binary newsgroups.
"After a while my clip art collection began to grow. Then I was hit by another bright idea. Why not make my collection publicly available by way of my own World Wide Web site? Surely there were other people looking for the same sort of images as I was! Moreover, I had made a reasonable effort to ensure that the images I had collected were in fact in the public domain and could therefore be freely distributed. So on August 25, 1995 I created "George's Wedpage" and posted the clip art I had obtained up to that time. It seemed to help fill a void that was surely lacking on the web.
"My site has grown a lot since then. The layout and design of my page has been revised several times. The quantity of clip art has increased as has the number of people visiting my site. It has become a repository for hundreds of clip art images with its theme being, of course, weddings. In designing my site I made an effort to keep it simple and uncluttered so that it would be easily navigable in addition to being useful. It is even Lynx-friendly though you'd be unable to directly view the clip art with the text-based browser Lynx. I ensured that the inline images on my pages were small so that the pages would load more quickly and I avoided using animated images which I find annoying. Furthermore, I never permitted advertising on my site nor have I accepted any payment for the services I have rendered.
"I've received hundreds of e-mail messages from visitors like yourself since the inception of my "wedpage". Most were simply to offer a word of thanks while others were inquiries or suggestions on how to improve the site (some of which I followed through with). I've tried to respond to most messages but I apologize to those of you whom I may have missed.
"One of the most interesting milestones associated with my site occurred in late 1996-early 1997 when an image of a rose from my site along with its web address was prominently featured in a full-page colour advertisement by Microsoft in various magazines throughout the world including Time, Sports Illustrated, Life, Newsweek, Stern, etc. A news columnist caught site of it and wrote up a short article about it in my local newspaper after interviewing me.
"So whatever happened with my wedding invitations and programs? Well, as it turned out we ended up buying our wedding invitations but we did create, with the help of the clip art in my collection and some wedding jokes I had also accumulated along the way, both wedding and reception programs which turned out to be quite nice and original.
"It is with regrets that I must now put to a close this site which I created two years ago and which has served hundreds of thousands of people ever since. It is my hope that others will take over where I have left off."
Copyright © 1997 Redsword Corp.
First created on August 25, 1995.
Last updated on August 12, 1997.