came into being thanks to legendary glamour queen Traci Topps

Early on the morning of 9th October 1997, Elliott was awoken by the telephone ringing, at his former home in Hampstead, London. It was Traci Topps, legendary American glamour qqueen. An hour conversation followed covering everything from the origins of the universe, to the colour of lipstick and the internet, with El firing loads of questions like:
"What's a server?" "What's a host?" "What's a domain name?"

Traci Topps: You should register your name.
Elliott : Why?
Traci Topps: Well, someone else could take it and then you can't have it.
Elliott : Oh....
Traci Topps: Shall I check to see if it is still available.
Elliott : Mmmm....why not?
Traci Topps: Yes it is.......
Elliott : Marvellous.....what does that mean....?
Traci Topps: I could register it for you......do you have a credit card?
Elliott : Yes, but you have to promise not to paint the town with it...
Traci Topps: Well, actually........mmmm........yes.......

Traci registered JAMES ELLIOTT.com for $250 Australian dollars whilst on the phone from Texas to London and much to her credit did not paint the town with El's credit card. The name was left parked on Australian servers for months. Elliott connected to the internet in 1998 and immediately understood its importance. So El moved the name to UK servers and put up a few pages. Amazed at the number of people hitting the site he decided to create a Megasite. El looked around the web and said:

"Whadayaknow?! A website is a website is a website!"

So he decided to do something different
The new site was the first ever virtual 3D museum of Art ever put on-line. In fact for years it remained the only site with a 3D interface. Although this was later imitated by others, like almost everything else El does. Since it has been on-line the site has gone through tens of thousands of changes and OVER 640 different versions. (The version number is published at the bottom of the index page.)

This expansion and fine tuning is still continuing today and the site is now thousands of times its original size

JAMES ELLIOTT.com