IconBAZAAR began its life in 1993 as a small collection of web-based graphics compiled by Randy D. Ralph for use by the academic community at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG).  For a time, the site was virtually hosted on a shared UNIX server at UNCG, along with numerous faculty and student web sites.  About one year later, the collection had become so popular that it consumed the largest share of the bandwidth among the web pages hosted on the UNCG servers and it was closed to outside Internet traffic.

In early 1994 the site was moved to a commercial web server hosted by InfiNet in Norfolk, Virginia and was given the name, "Randy's Icon and Image Bazaar." At this point, the site was still little more than a personal web site aimed at providing graphics to students and teachers.  However, more and more people began to need graphics to build their own web sites on the Internet, and since Randy's Icon and Image Bazaar was among the first collections of quality graphics on the web, traffic on the site began to steadily increase.

Bandwidth again became an issue, this time due to the prohibitive cost, and Randy's Image and Icon Bazaar was moved again to a local ISP, NetUnlimited, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with its own new domain name, "www.iconbazaar.com."  Shortly thereafter, the site was renamed "IconBAZAAR" and went fully commercial in mid 1994.  Every commercial web site needs a good, steady source of revenue to continue growth and maintain operations, so in 1996, IconBAZAAR contracted with Stratapult Studios to place advertising on the IconBAZAAR web site.   That year, traffic on the web site rapidly increased from approximately 50,000 impressions per month in February, 1996 to more than 2.5 million impressions per month in December, 1996...an increase of more than 4,000%!  This phenomenal growth leveled-off at approximately 2.7 million impressions per month in early 1997, but the site maintained a healthy expansion rate of around 14% per month.

During August of 1998, IconBAZAAR was incorporated as "IconBAZAAR, Limited Liability Corporation" in the State of North Carolina, and a short time later, contracted with XOOM.com as a member of the XOOM Virtual Host Program in San Francisco, California for a more lucrative advertising share, free hosting and free tech support.  In addition to these services, XOOM also offered the IconBAZAAR free listings and premier placement on its own web site, as well as on the web sites of its affiliates and partners.  This became a boon to IconBAZAAR's success, and traffic again began to increase rapidly.

Within one month of moving to XOOM's shared servers, IconBAZAAR's traffic level broke and surpassed an impression level of 3 million per month.  In mid 1999, XOOM and Snap! joined forces, and IconBAZAAR was re-located to a more secure, and far superior hosting facility owned and operated by Exodus Communications in Santa Clara, California.  With increased bandwidth, IconBAZAAR's traffic level again skyrocketed to more than 5 million impressions per month.  This increase, coupled with a new contract for shared advertising, brought moderate financial success to IconBAZAAR.

Under the new contract, revenues from advertising allowed IconBAZAAR's staff to purchase more equipment, software, computers and other much needed supplies for growing the business.   Early in 2000, Snap! and XOOM were taken-over by NBC Internet (NBCi).  Shortly following the take-over, IconBAZAAR became a premier member of the NBC Internet Alliance Partnership Program under a renewed contract with more than 6 million impressions per month and an average monthly income of $12,000 from advertising alone.  Sadly, the NBCi Alliance Partnership Program was severely mismanaged, and in December 2000, the Program was cancelled by NBCi.

IconBAZAAR returned to NetUnlimited, and contracted for four-years of dedicated server hosting for $450 per month.  At the time, this seemed reasonable, but would later prove to be a severe financial and administrative mistake.

In January of 2001, IconBAZAAR signed yet another shared advertising contract, this time with Zonfire, a division of the L90 Advertising firm based in Santa Monica, California.   IconBAZAAR was required to pay a "setup fee" of $2,000 to Zonfire before any advertising would be placed on the web site.  The fee paid, IconBAZAAR began advertising with Zonfire.  After five months under a two-year contract, having sent only two payments to IconBAZAAR - one in the embarassing amount of only sixty-six cents - Zonfire arbitrarily terminated the agreement.

Once revenues from advertising had completely dried-up, IconBAZAAR had to find another way to make money.  Rapidly bleeding finances from its accounts, with no capital coming in to offset the loss, we turned to NetUnlimited in February 2002 for help in implementing subscriptions.

After several months of testing and prep-work, in April, 2002, IconBAZAAR began its subscription campaign in hopes of sustaining itself with the revenue generated by sales of subscriptions.  After only four months, it became apparent that IconBAZAAR was not making enough from sales even to pay its dedicated hosting costs of $450.00 per month.  To make things worse, many of the users who had subscribed were not able to access the web site due to password and username database problems and browser incompatibility issues stemming from faulty implementation and poor engineering by the support technicians at our ISP.  From April to August, only 584 users out of an average of 17,800 unique visitors per day signed-up for subscription membership.

On August 9th, 2002, divine, Inc., our ISP, pulled the plug on our dedicated server.  We had only two days advance notice of the disconnection. Even though we had conferenced with our account representative at divine several times during the period from February 2002 through August 2002 to alert them that we were experiencing financial difficulties, and that payments may be delayed until sales revenues increased, we were given only two options, "pay in full right now," or, "find another host by Friday."  As we were unable to pay the amount demanded, there was nothing that we could do.  We informed our legal counsel of the intended arbitrary cut-off and sat back to watch it happen anyway.

Naturally, our 584 subscribed users were upset and angry because of the termination of their services.  Many of them sent quite convincing proof of this by email.   Since we do not have the money to offer any refunds, our sincere apology will have to suffice...We are genuinely sorry for our members' loss of services and the subscription fees that they paid, but there was simply nothing that we could have done to prevent it.

Shortly after we were arbitrarily disconnected from the Net, we purchased a year's web hosting from NetFirms.com for $60.00 so that we could post a message of apology to our users about the termination of all of our services, paid or free and also to request assistance from anyone who was able to host our site in exchange for advertising, or other services.

Our message of apology sparked many emails from concerned users, wishing us luck in getting back online.  Within a week, our petition for help was answered by several interested parties.  The company we chose to partner with, PerlCoders.com, is presently hosting IconBAZAAR in exchange for branding and advertising across our web site.  So far, PerlCoders.com has been very helpful in getting us back on our feet, and have offered us superior tech support whenever we need it.  Thanks to them, we are gradually increasing our traffic yet again!

Our hope is that we will be able to continue providing our services long into the future. However, we need help to do it.  If you can spare a few dollars, we would greatly appreciate a small donation.

Our Mission:

• To continually provide, with quality and excellence, the best and most useful graphic content available on the Internet for educational and personal web development, entertainment and edification.
• To continually create and display, original and engaging graphic content for our visitors' enjoyment and use.
• To always be respectful of and thankful for the people who have helped us build and grow over the years (that's you!).
• To uphold each and every one of our visitors' rights to personal privacy.
• To never, ever give-up, no matter how bad things get.

Our Overly-dedicated Staff:

Randy D. Ralph, MLIS, Ph.D. Senior Partner, Founder, C.E.O., Web Master and Graphic Artist Email:  <webmaster@iconbazaar.com>

Christopher E. Ralph, B.M. Managing Partner, Business Development Manager, Graphic Artist and Web Developer Email:  <info@iconbazaar.com>

The Evolution of Our Logo:

Early 1994

1994 - 1998

1998 - 2000

2000 - Present