#30: The Birth of ball.com

Ride the Wayback Machine to Ball’s First Website

At the start of 1995, there were only about 10,000 websites on the world wide web. By the end of that year, that number topped 100,000.

Ball Corporation was one of those new websites. The first www.ball.com, created by three employees who built it initially as a side project, debuted quietly and largely unnoticed months before its official launch on July 1, 1995.

Few within Ball knew about that initial launch. No one had been tasked with creating this new communications outlet. Like much of America at the time, most people at Ball had only just begun to hear about this thing called “the internet.”

Deb Granger (graphic design) , Curt Hastings (IT) and I knew each other from working together on other Ball assignments. I don’t recall who first brought up the idea, but we agreed that a Ball Corporation website might be useful one day - if this internet…