Ten years of ChessBase News
This is what our news page looked like back in 1996. It was a static HTML web site,
which slowly became bigger and more ambitious. You can track our progress in
the Wayback
Machine, which archives pages from the history of the Internet.
By the middle of 2001 our news
page design had progressed to the style you see in the screen shot above.
It was still a static site, manually maintained as individual HTML pages which were uploaded by FTP into different directories on a server.
In September 2001 we switched to a new, professional design and a database
driven content management. After a short period of experimenting with the system
we were ready to go live on September 12th. Everyone knows what happened one
day earlier, and so our very first news article in the new system, exactly ten
years ago, was a report describing the attack on the World Trade Center. You
can read the article
by clicking on the "News Archives" button at the bottom of our front
page and selecting page
001 in 2001.
Use the above buttons to go to the archives or the next page
If you click on "Last page" you will be taken back to September
2001
The news page has flourished since then, with over 100,000 unique visitors per
day – more when there are special or spectacular events on, or the occasional
scandal or controversy. Alexa.com
tracks the stats and ranks our news page as around the 15,000th most popular
web site in the world.
Over the last ten years we have published around 7,500 chess news reports. A
list of the most important events we cover is, as you probably know, to be reached
by clicking on "Games and
Tournaments" at the top of the page. The "Search" function
will scan the front page blurbs for any word you enter, while there is a more
extensive Google search of
the entire site also available. Naturally you can also do a regular Google search,
e.g. for "chessbase.com skripchenko", and click on "Images"
on the left if you want to see our photos. Recently we installed a new
ChessBase Shop with better
search and purchase facilities.
We thank all our contributors, who are providing us with material and pictures
in such great profusion. Any initial fears we may have had about finding enough
material to fill a news page dedicated entirely to chess have been thoroughly
dissipated. Today our main concern is to select judiciously from the flood of
information that keeps pouring in. Our criteria for reports are that they should
be interesting, accurate, important for chess, topical, entertaining and a few
more – in that order. This means that if there is news which fulfils the
lesser criteria (accurate, important for chess, topical) but not the first (interesting),
then we tend not to publish it.
Finally, in the age of digital cameras there is no scarcity of pictures and
visuals to lighten up our reports. However, it is important not simply to dump
pictures on readers. Ours are always carefully captioned and do not assume
that our readers will be satisfied with seeing images of some dude playing chess,
a nice-looking gal at the board, and another dude playing chess. Human interest
must be the guiding principle – people want to know more about the players
and the people involved at all levels of the game.
