About "sakartvelo.com"
This site - "sakartvelo.com" - is an attempt to create an online portrait of the Country of Georgia also called Sakartvelo, using all online resources that are related to this country and are currently available on the World Wide Web.
"sakartvelo.com" was created in 1995 - 1997 by Giorgi Topouria, who was a graduate student of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri - Columbia. This site started in the fall of 1995 as a class project for one of the courses.
At that time, there was almost no information about Sakartvelo available on the World Wide Web, so Giorgi has put together a very basic page about the country, which contained a map, a flag and few pictures of several regions of Sakartvelo.
Since fall 1995 we all have witnessed an amasing growth of the Web and along with it more and more online information became available about Sakartvelo due to the efforts of many Georgian and non-Georgian individuals and organizations.
Giorgi continued to add links to new resources to the above Georgia-page as they appeared on the Web, trying to put them in context and organize them in a way that would make sense and look nice. He also designed and added some original resources.
Thus, this page grew rapidly and soon turned (according to the feedback of the users) into the most complete collection of Georgia-related information available on Web. At the same time, the page has reached a point when it was already too long and bulky, took forever to download and became very difficult to navigate.
In the meantime, the traffic to the site increased significantly and so did the amount of feedback and inquires from the users. The feedback indicated, that the site was useful and liked, but, also, that it needed major restructuring in order to become more user-friendly and easier to navigate.
In May 1997, prior to conducting a survey of the users of this site for his thesis research, Giorgi restructured his site and moved it to its current location - www.sakartvelo.com. The results of the survey provided a wealth of information about the audience of the site, their preferences, needs and usage patterns and gave the author understanding of what needs to be done in order to further improve sakartvelo.com, enhance its performance and expand the services offered.
In August 1997, Giorgi has defended his thesis, graduated from the School of Journalism at the University ofMissouri - Columbia and returned to Sakartvelo, hoping to continue working on the site. There, due to unavailability of basic working conditions, limited Internet access and non-existance of any kind of support sakartvelo.com stopped functioning.
Once again thank you for visiting and your interest!
Now you can browse the site:
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Please do not forget to read:
How
to navigate "sakartvelo.com"
Thank you!