British Trees
 Over the years, sites with flashy designs and dominant domain names have crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. That's why it's refreshing to come across a site like british-trees.com. This site dedicated to the deciduous has chugged along on the Web since 1994. It's not a spectacular site to behold, and it never received any special recognition from Yahoo! Picks up to now.
That said, there's something about the folks who were on the Web creating compelling content way back in '94. The man behind the genesis of this humble site is Bill Unsworth. He started the site as a reference point for U.K. native tree life. It never grew in scope beyond its roots, but the site lives on today without Bill at the helm. He graciously donated it to non-profit The Woodland Trust in 2004. We caught up with Bill to talk about the early days of the Web and his love of trees... Hey Bill, when did you start your journey on the Web? Well, a former business partner suggested in early 1994 that I take a look at this Internet thing and at first I was a bit skeptical. I got a modem and signed up to a service and as soon as a I realized what was really going on I was hooked. I remember going to a primitive search engine and typing in "trees" and seeing some nice photos come up of rain forest in Costa Rica, and then I looked a bit closer and realized that the information was actually coming from a computer at a university in Costa Rica! Email also turned me on immediately. What inspired you to start British-Trees.com? Trees have been an interest of mine since the '80s. I had a small native tree nursery and lots of information about native trees. At the beginning of the '90s, I started writing a book but it was a bit of a slow job. When we started the ISP U-NET in '94, I saw the need to put up sites that would point the way as it were—at the time there were less than 50 websites in the UK from non-academic organizations. I realized that I had most of the makings of a site which would have genuine interesting and useful content and put the site up in about a month. Was initial response to the site positive? Sure—somehow in the early days it ranked amongst the most popular UK sites even though it was so specialized. I guess it showed early on that sites with real content got the traffic. What was behind your decision to donate the site in 2004? Well, I felt that a major revision of the site was coming due. It needed more photos and more interactive stuff on it and I was reluctant to invest the effort in getting to grips with the latest version of Dreamweaver. I also felt that perhaps it was becoming a bit of an orphan and needed to be part of a family of sites. I had turned down real money for it during the peak of the dotcom boom but I really felt it needed a good home. When I approached the Woodland Trust they were quite chuffed because they said that their staff used it for reference all the time! Have you always be a lover of plant life, specifically trees? I suppose so but not in any organized sense. I remember being upset when I was quite young when my father chopped down a Silver Birch in our garden when he got his first car and wanted to build a garage! From the site, we learned that there are only 33 native trees in Britain. Have you ever documented trees elsewhere in the world or felt any compunction to do so? No, sorry! In fact, the U.K. is easy because there are many less trees here than on the continent. What occupies your time these days? Well, I spend quite a bit of time on Simply Mail Solutions, which is taking off nicely meeting demand for more powerful email than old POP3. Other than that, it is all about travelling (I do a lot of hiking) and enjoying life! Thanks Bill! You're truly a Web pioneer.
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