Part 1 : Evolutionary Design Process

Edwin, you're still the right side of 30, but an "old timer" on the web. When and how did you first get involved with the Internet?
I first got involved with the Internet in 1992, while at university in the UK. We were all given a basic online account as part of our course. Of course back then in the "Dark Ages" before the Web, there weren't any graphical browsers to help people get around. It was all text-based groping in the dark with Gopher and Veronica... And you wouldn't believe the contortions you had to go through to see some of the pictures in the alt.binaries USENET groups! 

Was there a defining moment when you knew your future lay on the Internet?
It's hard to pin down a single inflection point. I guess if you had to twist my arm to answer the question, the closest I can get is that the Internet really became "significant" when I found I was earning nearly as much again from my online activities as from my day job. That made me reassess my priorities, and finally commit to the Internet full-time.

Which was your first site and why did you build it?
My first site was igoldrush.com (Editor's note: sold to DomainIt in January 2000), which I put together in autumn 1995. I'd been looking for information on how to register a domain name - how much it would cost me, what were the rules governing domain name ownership, and so on. I searched for quite a long time, but I couldn't find a site that offered the information I needed - I had to piece together the relevant information from many different sources. So I thought it would be interesting to set up a site based on the information I'd just spent time researching. You might say that I was trying to fill the "niche" I'd identified.

You have a technical computing background - did you find it difficult to pick up web promotion, marketing and business skills, and how did you go about this?
I read avidly everything I could get my hands on, on websites, USENET newsgroups, newsletters etc. Plus I've managed to spread the burden of learning over several years, since it wasn't until I set up Emailaddresses.com that traffic really started to roll in, even though my other sites were getting reasonable visitor numbers before. And I'm not afraid to throw things away and start again, whether it's the Nth iteration of a site's design or a sponsorship pricing plan that failed to attract any sponsors.

You now run a family of cross-marketed websites, primarily targeted at the beginner webmaster. Did this family arise by chance or was it a deliberate strategy?
Just like igoldrush.com, my other sites are based around things that I'd looked for on the Web but failed to find. When I set up SiteCash.com, for instance, there was far less information available about affiliate programs than there is today. So since I was busy learning webmastering myself, my sites were a natural spinoff of this learning process.

And did the development of the sites themselves follow a clearly defined plan or did they grow "organically"?
It would be nice to be able to claim that I had a "grand design", but actually I just set up my sites as ideas came to me. Once I had a few sites going, it was easy to jumpstart new sites with at least a minimum of traffic by simply announcing the new sites on the existing sites. I then sat back to see if the new sites were meeting a need. Several sites were clearly not going to become popular, and I gave up with these within a few weeks of launch.