Posted by Martijn Grooten on Feb 10, 2016
Virus Bulletin revealed its first website in the spring of 1996, almost 20 years ago. As was common in those days, it was referred to as 'our presence on the "world wide web"' — making me wonder whether millennials even know what www in so many domain names stands for.
Thanks to archive.org, we know that this is what the site looked like:
Over the course of 20 years, we have changed the design several times — and have made changes to the back-end of the site just as many times.
But when we asked people what they thought about our website, they often said it was rather cluttered and looked a bit old-fashioned. We agreed.
And, of course, that was only the front-end. The back-end ran on a platform that, according to its Wikipedia page, was retired in August 2009. (We ran our own fork of the platform, which continued to be supported — by us.)
During the past year, we have worked hard on rebuilding and redesigning the website. It has been a fun and at times frustrating project to work on, and I would like to thank my colleague, Lian Sebe, who did most of the work.
Today, the new website goes live. And to honour the occasion, we have also moved our site to a new domain: www.virusbulletin.com. (For the time being we are still using virusbtn.com for email.)
We know enough about IT security to be aware that no site or software is without its flaws and you may occasionally see something that doesn't work. Please let us know about it, or just bear with us as we keep a close eye on the web server's error logs.
And keep watching this space to learn about the new things we're adding to the website. Here's to www.virusbulletin.com!
Martijn Grooten
Editor, Virus Bulletin
