Co-founded with Tony Sellen on 21st September 1993, Business Geographics Limited (BGL) rapidly established itself as one of the UK’s most innovative Geographic Information System (GIS) consultancies, offering software and data supply, project work, programming and systems integration.
Digging back into the archives the first BGL website, on the iconic but no longer owned geoweb.co.uk URL, shows what pages on the early World Wide Web looked like. The company’s innovative UK General Election site of 1997 and corporate site ca.1999 are also shown.
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Business Geographics – 1995
The URL geoweb.co.uk was originally used for the Business Geographics Limited (BGL) website. Adrian learnt to design websites in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) in the early 1990s, not long after its creation and release by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989/1990. This website started life any time around 1993. Bathe in the early to…
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UK General Election – 1997
The URL election.co.uk was used for Business Geographics’ coverage of the UK General Election in 1997. Built by a core team of just a handful of people our coverage of events, angled substantially towards an explicitly geographical perspective, garnered millions of hits. The website featured: Adrian wrote about the design of the website for the…
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Business Geographics – 1999
The URL geoweb.co.uk was still in use for the Business Geographics Limited (BGL) website in 1999 but the appearance of the site, and amount of content, had evolved considerably from earlier versions. Still largely written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) the website now featured many more images as well as various database-driven elements, using…
It’s good to look back at some of the content, e.g., the description of the UK’s hierarchical postal system or the Census Packs we created as government-appointed Census Agents.
Over the years the company grew substantially, hiring new staff and moving out of shared offices into a trendy warehouse style space in Dryden Street, Covent Garden.
About four years after its foundation the company was acquired by one of its customers, International Poster Management Limited, a UK outdoor advertising specialist itself owned by US advertising giant Interpublic Corporation.
The acquisition gave Adrian his first ’15 minutes’ in the international business press and another three somewhat turbulent years running the company before leaving with his co-founder in 2000.
Fond memories, many achievements and the inspiration behind a strikingly similarly named course in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh.