eClasses has closed. No course is running, and nothing on this site can be bought, joined or enrolled in. What is kept here is the record of what was taught, by whom, and to whom — the catalogue, the instructors, the certificates and the testimonials, as they last stood.

For enquiries, write to archive(at)iwanet.org.

eClasses did not begin as eClasses. It began in 1998 as the online classes programme of the HTML Writers Guild, and became eClasses in its own right in 2002.

The earliest surviving capture of eclasses.org, from March 2002, shows that changeover in progress. The page is still titled “Services & Programs — The HTML Writers Guild”, its navigation already reads “eClasses Catalog” and “Why eClasses?”, and its footer reads:

“Last updated on 30 August 2001. Copyright © 1998–2001 by the HTML Writers Guild”

30 August 2001 is the day the Guild merged into the International Webmasters Association. See the capture: eclasses.org, March 2002.

It taught web technology online: instructor-led classes given by working professionals in the field rather than by full-time teaching staff. In its own words it offered

“Affordable Web Technology Education Since 1998… a catalog of 80 online courses covering the breadth of Web work, from HTML to Flash; from CSS to XML. All classes are taught by fellow experts and working professionals in the field.”

Quoted from the eClasses About page.

Over its life it taught more than 200,000 students, from its beginning as the Guild’s classes programme in 1998 through to its closure. The storefront said as much on its own front page, in the last version of this site: “Since 1998 more than 200,000 students educated.”

eClasses was not only a course catalogue of its own. It ran as a shared platform: a professional association could offer the whole catalogue to its members under its own name, at its own address, with its own course listing.

Each partner had a branded site on an eclasses.org subdomain, and its own catalogue feed. Three are visible in the archive:

Behind them the mechanism was simple: the server read the organization from the subdomain and served that partner’s catalogue and branding from the same course database. Links to those partner addresses now redirect here, to the corresponding page in this archive.

eclasses.org sold courses at open prices, to anyone. The partner sites existed so that an organization’s members paid less.

After the 2001 merger and the launch of eClasses, a full member of IWA received $100 off every course bought through iwa-hwg.eclasses.org. IWA listed it among its membership benefits in plain terms: “$100 savings on courses at eClasses.org”.

Membership cost $49 a year. A single course therefore repaid it twice over, which is the whole point of building the platform to serve organizations rather than only individuals: the association could offer its members something concrete at the checkout, and what it offered was not a discount code but a whole curriculum.

Each platform kept its own count of who it had taught. By early 2003 the IWA-HWG site reported 30,000 students since 1998 and the WITI site 25,000 — both drawing on the same catalogue, under their own names.

Courses were not only sold individually. They were arranged into qualifications a student could work toward.

Certified Web Specialist (CWS) — a programme to “prepare students for new career opportunities, assist to further the effectiveness of services rendered, and promote training in the designated disciplines.” Three tracks are preserved:

• Web Content Administrator (CWS11) — five courses
• Internet Marketing Specialist (CWS2211) — five courses
• Social Media Marketing Specialist (CWS23)

Web Study Certificates — four subject certificates, priced at $58 each:

• Web Technologies
• Web Programming
• Web Graphics and Multimedia
• Web Business

Individual courses also carried their own completion certificates, of which 95 are preserved here.

• 1998 — The HTML Writers Guild begins teaching classes online.
• August 2001 — The Guild merges into the International Webmasters Association. The classes continue.
• March 2002 — eclasses.org is still serving the Guild’s own pages, with the eClasses catalogue already in its navigation.
• 2002 — eClasses becomes an identity in its own right.
• October 2002 — The IWA-HWG platform is running at iwa-hwg.eclasses.org.
• April 2003 — The WITI platform reports more than 25,000 students since 1998.
• — More than 200,000 students taught across the whole of that span.
• 2026 — Enrolment has long since ended; the site is preserved as an archive.

• The course catalogue — 101 course pages, each with its syllabus, week-by-week outline and the job roles it was aimed at.
• Certificate programmes — the CWS tracks and the four Web Study Certificates, with their course requirements.
• Instructors — profiles of the working professionals who taught the classes. 28 photographs survive; where one does not, the instructor is still named.
• Testimonials — what students said about the courses at the time.
• Completion certificates — 95 of them, one per course.
• The storefront as it last stood — the catalogue, the cart, the categories and the bestseller list, exactly as the last visitors saw it.

Earlier versions are held by the Internet Archive, whose record of eclasses.org begins in March 2002.

• hwg.org — the HTML Writers Guild, whose members eClasses taught through the IWA-HWG platform.
• archives.hwg.org — the Guild’s mailing lists, 82,731 messages from 1997 to 2005.
• iwanet.org — the International Web Association, which continues today.