5th July 2006

We originally registered the domain name on the 18th March 1999, and the original site would have been live a month or two later. What a lot of people don't know, mainly because we barely advertise the fact, is that Cool Breeze is in fact a web development company rather than just a search engine. The search side of CB very nearly didn't happen and caused more than a few differences of opinion within the company back in those early days. What I saw really early in the life of the mainstream internet (1997/98) was that search was going to be a major factor. I mean, what was the point of having a website if no one knew it was there or could find it?


What happened was this…

Back in the late nineties, the first wave of panic came over the owners of a large number of SMEs (small & medium sized companies) which got them thinking that if they didn't have an internet presence they were missing out somehow. And in some ways they were right. The problem was that they didn't know where to go. The best way to get in with a SME was (and still is) via recommendation; the problem was that they didn't know anyone else who had a website to ask who had done it for them and if they were any good. They knew a friend whose 15 year old son played around with building sites in his bedroom but most of them just couldn't go there.

What happened was that they contacted their printers and graphic designers and asked them about getting on the web. The thinking would have been that they had handled their advertising in the past, so they might be able to help with this new media. Initially the printers and the graphic designers apologised and said they were unable to help, but after more and more of their customers called them for the same reason they realised that there a was an opportunity to diversify, bought the work experience kid a book on HTML, sat him down with a computer and started building websites.

And it was great, all these new sites started appearing, nicely designed for the time and everyone was happy. The printers and graphic designers had a nice new income stream, the work experience kid was now a team leader and had a Golf GTI in the car park, and the SME owners proudly showed off their sites to their employees, wives and children. The future was looking good.


What happened next?

Well, after the SME owner had shown his site to his 18 employees and the 5 members of his family, he waited for the phone to start ringing off the hook. And he waited… After a while he thought that there was maybe something wrong with it so he called the people who built it for him who checked the stats and told him that in the first four months his site has been live he had had 23 visitors. And this was where they all ran out of ideas.

Historically (and to this day) if you use printers and graphic designers to create your printed literature they design it, print it, pack it in boxes and deliver it to your door. For this printed material to be of any use to you as a marketing tool, you have to make it work, they were not going to help in that way. And they were the same when it came to the websites they built. They would build and load it up onto the web, but if it was going to do anything for you, you had to do it yourself. The problem with this of course was that the SME owners had about as much of an idea about how to make a website work for them as the printers and graphic designers did - basically none.

So the second wave was one of distrust in anything internet related, and which interestingly happened about the same time as the dot com crash. Coincidence?


And then there was Cool Breeze...

We used two highly visual postcard campaigns which we sent out to thousands of local companies and got a really good response on both occasions. Part of the selling point was that we had our own search engine. I had been researching how the big search engines (Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista, Infoseek, Jeeves, Webcrawler, Yahoo and the new one, Google) worked and each and every one of the sites we created were built in such a way that they would come in very high, if not at the top, of their listings. Hardly anyone else knew how to do this and some of our SMEs cleaned up. Of course they were very excited about what was happening to them so they told everyone they knew which made our phones very busy indeed.

The very early years of the new millennium really were an exciting time for any web development company who knew how to work the search engines, but inevitably it had to end at some point. Around 2002 we saw the emergence of PPC (pay per click) which, by the end of 2003, pretty much ended the days of the skillful web guy getting your site to the top of the search engines. If you wanted to be there you basically had to pay for it. There are still people out there taking a lot of money off small companies promising them high positions but they ALL fail to deliver.


Everyone was at it

Cool Breeze as a search engine launched around the same time as Google. I know they may have had the upper hand over the last few years, but you have to admit our new 2006 design really does blow them away and I am hoping we can knock them, Yahoo & MSN off the number one spot before the end of the year. Also around the time we launched, a number of other UK specific search engines / directories came into being. Sadly most of them are no longer with us, these guys were pioneers and deserve a mention - Highforce, 250000, England Online, Linkcentre, UK Max, The Brit Index, and more I can't remember. More power to you guys.

So here we are in July 2006 with a brand new Cool Breeze. We have always tried to make it a useful site with easy access to the links that you need every day like maps, weather, news, sport and TV listings. Unlike most other sites of our genre, we are not afraid to link to other sites. Most sites seem to want to keep you within their four walls (so to speak) and try to be all things to all people. My thoughts are: what is the point in us trying to do everything when there are sites out there doing it much better than we could ever do. We concentrate on doing what we do and what we have always done best, which is acting as a hub - a place to start from to go find what you are looking for. And maybe a place to stop for a coffee, play one of the games or check the latest footie results.

I really hope you like the new site. If you have any comments about it, or anything related to CB for that matter, please drop me a line via the contact us page. We are still in the web development business and will be adding a portfolio of our latest projects over the next month or so.

Thanks for your interest
Nick