The Verse - Volume 24
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Purple Particulars – Purplemath.com

Need help with algebra? Think Purple!

Purplemath (www.purplemath.com) began in 1998 as a personal web site created by Elizabeth Stapel. Ms. Stapel's initial site included course-specific materials for her math students. Later, she started adding a few lessons. As she created more lessons, traffic at her personal site increased.

Eventually, she decided to do a complete site redesign to create a more professional appearance and to highlight the list of lessons. In order to pick a color theme, she asked her son, then about two and a half years old, which color he liked best. Naturally, he picked purple.

Traffic continued to increase, and in 1999 the site had to be moved from its free hosting to its own domain name. When Ms. Stapel struggled to find a name, her husband suggested "Purplemath", and the the name was duly registered. A few years later, "Purplemaths" (with an "s" at the end) was added for the benefit of British-English speakers.

Purplemath served 10.6 million pageviews in 2005. Currently, Purplemath uses about 60 gigs of bandwidth a month, serves around forty thousand pageviews each day to a total of about thirteen thousand daily visitors.