The Paris Pages Experience Index 
A Short History
Les Pages de Paris / The Paris Pages officially went online 14 July 1994. Production of web content took place in California, while data aquisition happened in Paris. It was, and remains, a private initiative. Yet from the start the project involved a distributed network of people whose only association was a love of Paris, and the excitement of putting content online. That said, the spirit of the Paris Pages was To Be, Not To Seem. Every effort was made to have important content put online in a useful way, while at the same providing a framework where people would be free to contribute content and also have full unambiguous attribution (http://www.paris.org/Group/).
Originally it was named WWW Paris, but this proved to be burdensome in conversation, in both English, and French. On 6 February 1995 the name was changed to the present one.
The opening was procceded by a data and resource aquisition phase, as well as writing the actual html. Additionally, significant reflection was given to the overall directory structure with an eye toward flexibility for future additions and modifications to the site if it became successful. This included the question of whether to use 'absolute path' syntax, or 'reletive path' syntax when coding links.
The state of the World Wide Web in July 1994 was quite different from what it is now. At that time, there were very few web sites having anything to do with French Culture. There were none dedicated to the City of Paris, and indeed there was only one small collection of images of the city - titled Flying Over Paris - on a university server in Britain. Unfortunately, this collection was subsequently deleted by the system administrator in 1996 who then dutifully informed the Paris Pages that the link was now 'stale'. An unfortunate, though small, loss of web history.
By 21 July the project had been visited by 143 unique hosts generating 3712 accesses, and by 27 July there had been a total of 24,645 accesses since the 14th. Tiny numbers indeed. When the site was finally listed on NCSA's What's New page on 28 September, accesses jumped by a factor of roughly 50.
The original major sections included Museums, Monuments, the Métro, and Visitor Center. Shops, Schools, Faculties & Institutes, a page of Other Links, Cafés and Special Expositions were quickly added. The latter was prompted by a contribution from a third party of a project regarding an 19th century French illustrated book - "L'idee fixe du Savant Cosinus" by Christophe (http://www.paris.org/Expos/Cosinus/). At first it was unclear how to incorporate the project, but then the idea was hit upon to simply host the contribution within the Paris Pages' Special Expositions section, while giving full attribution to the contributor. Several Special Expositions have been contributed since then (http://www.paris.org/Expos/).
In order to avoid copyright issues, all of the images of Paris were taken personally by the site creator, or used with permission. Originally paper photographs were taken, scanned, then manipulated in Adobe Photoshop on a Macintosh, but the first two steps have now been replaced by slides, and Photo CD to significant advantage.
Over the months subsequent to the opening, information was added slowly, and by hand, but still fit within the original general framework and directory structure. More museum and monument pages were added, the Louvre page was enriched and expanded, due to its popularity. An interactive map linking geographical position to museums and maps was added in Spring of 1995 (http://www.paris.org/Maps/MM/). While an obvious extension, it was a powerful way of linking museums and monuments geographically, as well as giving a general context to their relationship to the city's layout. It was the start of associating different data types - Museums, Monuments, Geographical Location, Relationship to the City.
On 24 March 1995, header and footer links to aide navigation were added to the top and bottom of all pages. These links to both the home page, and the navigation page of links to general categories, allowed one to follow a non-linear path through the site (http://www.paris.org/navigate.html). At the time, these were somewhat inovative ideas. While people often had Return To Home links, they did not have links to a navigation page. But due to the size of the Paris Pages even then, it became clear that further growth would create a site which could not be easily visited unless something was done.
Around St. Patrick's Day 1995, Ric Erickson, writer living in Paris made contact with the Paris Pages, and a fruitful collaboration was begun, setting the stage for both near real time reporting of important events in Paris, as well as the monthly magazine Paris Kiosque (http://www.paris.org/Kiosque/). This included near real time reporting of French Presidential elections in April 1995; the Paris Pages acreditation to the 8 May 1995 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII at Place de l'Etoile - the only web organization with such acreditation; and daily updates during the Strikes of November/December 1995.
The logistics of setting up an operation with story acquisition in Paris, production in California, and the requirement of near real time reporting required certain computer skills, as well as internet access by everyone concerned, but ultimately was not particularily difficult. In all cases, the Paris Pages brought Paris news to the web faster than any of the news organizations such as CNN, Reuters, or the French media (France 2, France 3, etc).
On 17 May 1995, IBM graciously began to sponsor the web server hardware and internet connection for the Paris Pages. This made a great improvement in general server performance, as as well work environment.
Also around this time, the Office de Tourisme de Paris agreed to a collaboration with the Paris Pages. This was to last for another 18 months before ending for reasons unconnected with its success.
In June 1995, Point Communications listed the site, and several sub-sections as being among the Top 5% of all web sites world-wide - an honor that some have believe has been attributed to at least 20% of all web sites. What was most surprising however was their award to the Louvre sub-section as being one the the Best Ten Sites Worldwide (http://www.paris.org/Musees/Louvre/). The other nine sites? They were CNN, Sony Corp., Apple, SGI, and SUN among others.
Content continued to be added throughout all of this. An idea of general development can be had by looking at the What's New pages
- 14 July 1994 - 29 April 1995
http://www.paris.org/Kiosque/whatsnew0.html - 10 May 1995 - present
http://www.paris.org/whatsnew.html
The response to this problem has been twofold. First, a database paradigm for the site was decided upon, and secondly, creation of html pages directly from a database became an application into which resources would be invested.
This paradigm continues to be the one the project believes is the best strategy for running the site. There are now several databases, and several tools for creating html from them. We discuss these ideas in a bit more detail at the end of the paper.
In November 1996, we added the Paris Pages' Boutique (http://www.paris.org/boutique/) which allows for secure online and offline transactions. The Boutique sells cultural and educational items, such as CD-ROMS by the Reunion des musees nationaux (RMN).
The site now has 8000+ pages, 3000+ images, and roughly 6 - 7 million accesses per month. We estimate roughly 500,000 unique sessions per month most of which last at least 20 minutes. It remains essentially a private self-funded initiative.