Glenn Davis (born June 21, 1961) was one of the first

web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...

ers. He is best known for his websites ''

Cool Site of the Day Cool Site of the Day is an early website created in August 1994 and originally maintained by Glenn Davis. Linking to one single recommended site off its homepage each day, it soon became an arbiter of taste on the Internet. Within a few months o ...

'' and ''Project Cool'' and for being a founding member of the

Web Standards Project The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies. Foun ...

. Davis created

in August 1994. Linking to one single recommended site off its homepage each day, the site soon became an arbiter of taste on the Internet, and its award was a coveted prize among

Silicon Alley Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term ha ...

start-ups. Cool Site of the Day also sparked a large number of similar coolness awards. Davis became a celebrity through ''Cool Site of the Day'', giving interviews to magazines and radio networks such as

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

while fending off gifts from site maintainers who sought his recommendation of their sites. ''

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely ...

'' celebrated Davis as one of the 50 most important people on the Internet in 1995, dubbing him the "King of Cool." In time for the first anniversary of ''Cool Site of the Day'', Davis inaugurated the ''Cool Site Of The Year'' award, also known as the Webby, which was first presented in

Hollywood Hollywood usually refers to: * Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California * Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States Hollywood may also refer to: Places United States * Hollywood District (disambiguation) * Hollywoo ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

, in August 1995, and was given to

The Spot The Spot, or thespot.com, was the first episodic online story (1995–1997), and covered bandwidth and production costs by offering paid advertising banners on the web pages and product placement within the journal entries. The site earned one ...

. Davis left ''Cool Site of the Day'' in November 1995. In January 1996 he founded ''Project Cool'' with Teresa Martin, a new media specialist at

Knight Ridder Knight Ridder was an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. Until it was bought by McClatchy on June 27, 2006, it was the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, with 32 daily newspaper bra ...

. This new venture was conceived as an educational resource center teaching web development. ''Project Cool'' continued the daily award concept under the name "Project Cool Sighting." The site became a respected and widely used resource on web development techniques, and its founders co-authored two books to complement it. Davis co-founded the

with

Tim Bray Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 wh ...

Jeffrey Zeldman Jeffrey Zeldman is an American entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster and speaker on web design. He is the co-founder of A List Apart Magazine and the Web Standards Project. He also founded the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldma ...

and George Olsen, among others. In 2000, he founded ''Astounding Websites'', an online forum created to review and discuss the best writing, design, and programming on the web. Davis gave up on the web as a medium in 2002, dismissing it as "old hat" because he believed there was little room for significant further breakthroughs. Davis has been recognized for defining the technique of "liquid" web design. Davis came back to the web in April 2022 launching his new website Verevolf, where he publishes web history stories.

References

History of the Internet American technology writers American designers Living people Web designers 1961 births {{Web-stub