On Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, Christopher Witcombe's Art History web site will be 10 years old - almost as old, it should be noted, as the World Wide Web itself.

The Sweet Briar College professor created the site in 1995 as a research and teaching tool for his art history students. Simple in design and easy to navigate - sans bells and whistles, Witcombe said - it offers carefully evaluated and organized links to the web's best resources on the subject. Today, if you search Google for the words "art history," the site always pops up first in the list - without fail, as it has for several years.

That's significant. Google uses an algorithm that, in effect, ranks web sites by displaying them in the order that they are used by visitors searching on key words. The most visited site, the reasoning goes, statistically has the greatest chance of answering the searcher's question.

With the large amount of traffic generated by its Google rankings, the site accounts for the majority of web site hits on the SBC network - introducing millions of people a year to Sweet Briar College. Over the past 12 months, more than 3 million visits and more than 36 million "hits" have been recorded on http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html.

For tracking purposes, visits are considered more or less unique occurrences, although there is no way to know the exact number of people using a given site. One user can record many hits in the course of a visit.

"As many as 12,000 people a day may see pages with Sweet Briar on it," Witcombe said, pointing to an online statistics chart showing daily visits. "There are other sites out there, companies and corporations, who would love to have traffic like this."

The highest one-day total in October 2005 was more than 14,000 visits. The month's daily average is about 12,000 visits - high, but not atypical during the school year, when the numbers rise dramatically. The pattern indicates that students and teachers are heavy users of the site, Witcombe said.

Although he recognized early on the power of the Internet for teaching in his field, he never envisioned how popular it would become.

"I'm staggered by the number of users, which have been going up each year. This is going to sound corny," he said, laughing, "but back in 1995, I was convinced that the web was the future. When I saw how it combines text and images, I said 'This is the perfect medium for teaching, especially art history.' "

He taught his first web-based classes in the spring of 1996, putting everything the students needed - images, readings, syllabus, bibliographies and review material - online.

"A major advantage using the web is that students can access the course material from almost anywhere, anytime, for research, studying and completing assignments. Today I teach in a seminar room with each student sitting in front of a laptop."

"They like it. They're very engaged," he said.

Witcombe also posts essays and other resources online, which can be accessed through an index of the site.

— By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer