From the basic text-driven staff-only content website
in 1996, gulfnews.com has grown into the most widely read uae-based news site providing the latest in news and views

September 1, 1996, was a milestone for Gulf News because it was the day it became one of the first newspapers in the Middle East to go online.

The launch came two months after Hotmail started providing free e-mail to everyone; barely a year after Etisalat hosted the first internet service in the UAE and five years after Tim Berners-Lee invented the web software.

Over the past 12 years, gulfnews.com has gone through constant transformations and identity changes.

It started as a very basic, text-driven and staff-only content website, with a single home page picture, either linked to a story or just as a stand-alone. It featured stories on the UAE, the Gulf and the world. It also had special sections on business, sports and opinion.

Origin of gulfnews.com

It all started one afternoon on July 29, 1996 when my boss, then Administrative Editor Nicholas Coates, asked me to attend a seminar sponsored by Gulf News management.

I was told that I was one of two employees from the library department who would be trained on how to access the internet. My primary focus was to learn how to receive and send e-mails since the plan was for us to take charge of the Gulf News editorial e-mails.

Though I had already read about it a few months before, I only saw what internet pages looked like one week before our training when our engineers installed two personal computers exclusively for web access in the editorial newsroom.

There was so much hype about the internet in the office - I was very keen to know more. During our training period, I even stayed back at the office till early morning for a week just to study HTML writing.

I was surprised and pleased when our internet consultant taught me more about website management as by that point I had been asked to maintain the fledgling website.

By Patrick Masahud, Online Production Coordinator

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