So what is this?

Zebra is a site in development. It started in April 2000 as an exercise in organising an unwieldy array of bookmarks. There were a lot of interesting sites out there but I would go to one and never manage to find it again.

This was especially the case with architectural product sites. I could never remember to bookmark the good ones, and had to wait until I saw an ad in a magazine before I could find my way back to it. In this sense it is an essentially selfish site, there to organise my own favourite architecture sites into a format that I could easily navigate. I finally put it on to the web, in case anyone else might be interested.

From there Zebra has grown to over 2000 links in many categories. It attempts to provide a small centre of architecture for the australasian region, which suffers from a lot of adequate sites that don't, in my opinion, quite cut it.

Zebra currently runs on the smell of coffee. All time spent on it is volunteer, and running costs are kept to a minimum by utilizing several free web services and programs. There is no venture capital or prominent address. It is earning its stripes the old way.

Unlike many architecturally-inclined websites in this region, this one is actually run by a full time architect. This enables me to continually interrogate the site from the viewpoint of a working architect. It undergoes constant tweaking in order to make it as relevant as possible.

In a terribly altruistic move, I began gathering news links from local news sites. In a questionable move I began writing the occasional article. These new components have attracted the most favourable comment (despite the typos), but they are draining in terms of time spent.

Zebra traffic is growing slowly but steadily. This is despite having no print advertising or commercial affiliations. Return traffic is increasing and it feels that this site is starting to make itself known by strength of word-of-mouth and, of course, Google.

Zebra welcomes any feedback, propositions, free labour, articles, news releases, photos of interesting completed work, and coffee.

Zebra is evolving and should soon become a more noticeable part of the local webscape.

Thanks for your visit.

in case you were wonderingPeter Johns
Architect, Melbourne


zebra architecture links ©  2001   last revised 13.09.01 search site