This Pearl Jam Lyrics page was created in 1996 so I could learn something about creating web pages.  I was trying to get a new position at work and someone suggested I take it upon myself to learn how to make web pages.  So I started with the basics - learning HTML.

I thought the only way to learn HTML was to actually create a web site - so that's what I set out to do.  The thought of creating a Pearl Jam page was not my first idea.  I wanted to do a page dedicated to the first computer I ever had, the Coleco Adam Computer.  But someone at work, Nicole,  changed my mind.  She told me she had created a page on elephants and was getting thousands of hits from it - I thought that was pretty cool (it hadn't occurred to me to make a website that other people would actually want to  visit - I just wanted experience). 

So I dropped the Adam idea because I knew nobody would visit a site on an ancient computer.  I was big on grunge music at the time and was listening to Pearl Jam.  Their lead singer Eddie Vedder is one of the world's great mumblers and I would usually have to look up the lyrics on the internet to figure out what he was singing about.  But none of the lyrics sites I looked up were very good so it hit me to just make a Pearl Jam site myself - I found my topic and figured there must be a need for it since I was even trying to find the lyrics.  Plus the fact that Pearl Jam was far bigger in 1996 than they are now.

I had an AT&T WorldNet account and created the site there.  When I was done I wasn't getting any traffic.  There was no Google at the time.  So I set about asking other Pearl Jam sites on the web to link to me and I even joined web rings - which still operate today.  But nothing seemed to drive traffic to my site.  It wasn't until Yahoo added my site to their directory listing that I started getting around 100 hits a day.

But it didn't take long for me to lose interest in this site.  I pretty much left it for dead and moved on. But times changed and instead of directory listings, search engines sprang up.  Five or six years later I was startled to see that my Pearl Jam page was ranking number #1 in most search engines and getting thousands of hits a day.  It now has over 2 million hits (on the home page alone).  Seeing that, I felt I had a responsibility to actually get the content up to date again.  I've just recently created a blog for it to let fans  post their comments.

Today - this site drifts in and out of the top slots in search engines and it's still running on an old WorldNet account.  Many of the original Pearl Jam sites in 1996 are gone now.  The world is populated by gigantic lyrics sites that have thousands of groups and millions of lyrics pages.  But little guys like me still manage to get a loyal following.

By the way, I don't know whatever happened to Nicole.  She left the company in 1996, before I even had a chance to show her my site.  I wonder if her elephant page is still up.