Category: Business Geographics Limited

Business Geographics – 1999

Visit now!

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 Microsoft Access databases and the Allaire ColdFusion scripting language (now owned by Adobe), e.g., to power the News section.

Throughout the early to mid-1990s, when many of our competitors were still using paper brochures for price lists or marketing material, our website brought in many leads.

Our use of database-driven methods was also innovative, enabling us to pitch for work on higher-end projects and to develop sophisticated sites of our own, such as the 1997 UK General Election website once hosted at election.co.uk.

Fortunately, and impressively given the 25+ odd years that have elapsed since the 1997 Election or 1999 BGL websites were created, these database-driven pages written in Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) still work today.

The computer hosting this archive is running Ubuntu Linux, Apache2 and Tomcat and the open source Lucee CFML server with the UCanAccess JDBC driver for Microsoft Access databases. Back in the day it was Windows NT, IIS and the Allaire CFML server…

Bathe in the late-1990s aura of the old geoweb.co.uk website by taking a step back in time to visit the Business Geographics site as it was in mid-1999.

June 23, 2025
UK General Election – 1997
Visit now!

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:
- Clickable image maps from UK to constituency levels.
- Town to constituency search facilities.
- Interactive zoomable maps with the MapGuide plugin.
- Maps in Virtual Reality Markup Language format.
- Geographical organisation of content, e.g., by counties.
Adrian wrote about the design of the website for the Association of Geographic Information 1997 Conference, at which it won a prize for Technological Progress.

www.election.co.uk – the creation of a geographically referenced web site for the 1997 General Election

Later, others (Mahoney & McLaren, 1999) commented on the relevance of the site as part of the use of spatial data to enhance the democratic process.

The use of spatial data to enhance the democratic process

The Election 1997 website was highly influential, effectively setting the pattern for most major online coverage of elections throughout the world!

The contributing team had another crack of the whip for Blair’s re-election contest in the UK General Election of 2001. By this time most, including Adrian, had left Business Geographics to form Lead Hat Limited but the [geo]electoral news formula continued to carry over.
June 23, 2025
Business Geographics – 1995

Visit now!

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 mid-1990s aura of the old geoweb.co.uk website by taking a step back in time to visit the Business Geographics site as it was in mid-1995.

The BGL website from around 1999 has also been restored, by which time the amount of content, and our expertise in authoring websites, had grown considerably…

June 23, 2025
Business Geographics Limited
Acquired, B2B, Business Geographics Limited

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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
June 20, 2025