Originally created in mid 1997, as our contribution to the community, this web site was launched in our space at Sympatico. It grew there and shared space with the Cambridge and District Humane Society and Cambridge Galleries. At first it was comprised of about 10 pages with a few pictures. Within a half year, the site was revamped and featured its popular Cambridge Collage. It featured some rudimentary parks pages (extracted from the Cambridge Reporter's "Activities Guide" - thanks Cambridge Reporter!) but the information was out there. It began to present contact information for the city (which soon staled). The postcard center was launched near the end of February, 1998 - with 16 different Cambridge cards.

By this time the site had outgrown Sympatico's space and they wouldn't sell us any more so we sought an alternative. That turned out to be (the now defunct) Huron Internet Technologies of Kitchener. The Humane Society, Cambridge Galleries and Cambridge's Public Library System got their own addresses and this site was left as a "stand-alone" site.

At the beginning of 1998, the site was noticed and brought to the attention of the Cambridge Reporter, Cambridge's daily newspaper. Visitorship took a very small step up. Then, about one month later, visitorship doubled and now is more than 10 times that.

We enhanced the parks section and added a new section on trails.

Trails brought visitors from outside of Cambridge to the "Tour de Grande" bicycle rally. The site was succeeding.

The postcard center, in the meantime, went up and down until it finally came to a crashing halt in September of 1998. It was a mere week later when our site took to its sick bed. We experienced server problems. Recovery was slow but we found our way back on to the Internet (thanks to SCSInternet). It took a little while but conditions improved, the Postcard Center returned and our site is now quite acceptably speedy (and can only get better).

Cambridge websites was then added. It was divided into three sections: Yellow Pages, Personal Sites and Reciprocal Links. Links on the Yellow Pages and Personal Sites require that the owners of the linking page have a business established, physically, in Cambridge or that they be a resident of Cambridge (respectively). Reciprocal links require that a link to us be placed (in advance) on the site requesting a link on our reciprocal page.

We expect that we will, at some point in the future, be obliged to include links in Kitchener/Waterloo and, perhaps, surrounding areas.

Ah, well. As we all know, nothing in life is free. We had to go commercial so we started seeking support for the site and found it in the form of E-advertising (bannering, etc.). Naturally, we would prefer Cambridge representation so if you wish to contribute to the survival of this project, please visit the Advertising Page. We try to make it very affordable for Cambridge business. Advertising and projects like various small bookstores distributed through our sites and arts.galganov.net contribute to making this site possible. We hope arts.galganov.net will soon feature successful Cambridge artists who may (or may not - at their option) offer their work for sale to the world.

Then the end of 1998 came around and the site had grown so large with features like old postcards which were contributed to this site by Isabelle Cowan Morley residing in the U.S.A. She was a child visiting Cambridge when her grandmother lived here. Her grandmother had held on to these postcards from many years ago. Isabelle was kind enough to contribute copies of the well maintained specimens so we could share them with the world. We believe these images to now be in public domain.

In celebration of the upcoming new year, we wanted to do something special for the holidays so we went out and started taking more pictures. We couldn't get enough of them processed quickly enough so the Cambridge Times graciously permitted us to reproduce their 1998 Festival of Lights images.

Here, we saw an opportunity. We now had a chance to revamp this site once again. While visitors to the site got to see a daytime picture of the Christmas tree at Queen's Square between 6:00 am and 6:00 pm, and evening images of that same tree - alternating with the Cambridge Times' pictures from their Festival of Lights at night, we started redesigning the site.

The 1998 cover page collage could no longer support more links. The site had outgrown the navigation tools. We needed a fresh approach. Something a little faster... more contemporary.

Since the last collage celebrated (pretty much) the history of Cambridge, we decided that the 1999 collage would celebrate Cambridge's future. Hence, the image of transportation, contemporary industry, contemporary housing and trees (you need some nature) graces the front page as a decorative image depicting our future in this burgeoning tourism, technology and industry based community.

The Postcard Center now has two pages of cards (27 individual images) to choose from and we have also included the new Wallpaper section where you can find Cambridge decorations for your monitor.

Navigation to main areas are from textual links while you will find links to lower level sections in the pull-down menus - all on the side-bar to the left.

We believe this site to run properly in all contemporary, popular browsers and computers/platforms. (It has been tested on PC compatible and LINUX). Navigation hints and tips may be found on the help page of this web site.

Because of the new volume of information, the new layout does not always permit us to, as we have in the past, design pages that will work on 640 x 480 pixel screen resolution but most computers (even some still running Windows 3.1) can be set to a higher resolution (i.e. 800 x 600). For help with resolution settings please consult your manuals or contact your computer hardware dealer.

Through the year you will see numerous enhancements. We hope, through the next summer, to add more virtual tours of parks and to offer more images of Cambridge's Heritage Trails. Given the opportunity we will also add a business development section.

We thank you for visiting Virtual Cambridge and hope you will enjoy your tour many times again... And if you haven't yet, please sign our guestbook. Tell everyone you were here!

Please remember, all signatures and web site submissions are reviewed for "family safety" content prior to posting.

This web site is is unofficial and, other than describing our home town, is in no way connected with the Corporation of the City of Cambridge.

May 24, 2000: On May 22, 2000 we capitulated on certain issues in question regarding actions undertaken by The Cambridge Public Library System, the Corporation of the City of Cambridge and their lawyers. Our library and gallery sites will no longer promote Cambridge. They will be revamped to attempt to serve a wider, virtual only public. On today's date, this web site officially adopted it's URL http://CambridgeWeb.Net as its site name. This site will now be known as CambridgeWeb.Net.

While we are still unsure of the future of this web site it is likely, due to the impracticality of defending such a law suite, that content growth will be less focused on the Community of Cambridge. We do not, at this time, anticipate removing any content presently available.

We appreciate those who have supported our web sites and hope you will continue to find value in the sites we bring to you. Enjoy your visit and please come back!

The Galganovs