Welcome to The Incredible Art Department. This site began in late 1994 as a showcase for my elementary art students in a school in Indianapolis, Indiana. This site was the second educational website in Indiana. The first was a 5th grade classroom in Brookview Elementary. My district  was not ready for this exposure so they told me to remove the site. Instead of completely folding it, I decided to open it up to the world. The response was phenomenal. I received 8,555 visitors the first year. Now the site receives millions of visitors each year.

As the number of visitors grew, the site kept getting booted off my internet providers' servers. In one case, the site took down their entire server when Netscape featured IAD on their index page. As the visitors to this site grew, I could not find any companies willing to host the site for free. I went through four moves until I found our current home.

Later I found that I could not keep up with the hundreds of submissions and link requests. Because of the number of submissions I sent out a request for help and for a time, several art teachers and even a high school student helped out. Judy Decker was a retired teacher who offered to help and she assisted me for about eight years. When she began to help, she brought with her files she had on her school art room page. She later expanded her files into a section she called Incredible Resources. This section added many resources to the site and was a great addition.

On November 2, 2009, Judy Decker left IAD and took with her the Incredible Resources section. She intends to put these files up on a new website in January. I will add a link to her site once it becomes available.This will be a big win for art educators because now there will be two sites that will have their own unique flavor. Currently I am scrambling to fill in the gap that was left and intend to slowly replace her section with resources of my own.

I am the moderator of the art education and artjobs listgroups hosted on this website and continue to update the site. I have enjoyed the friends I have met here and welcome your continued e-mail. I am grateful to Princetonol.com for putting up with the bandwidth demands of this website. Google ads were first added to reimburse the host for the bandwidth use. Later as IAD increased traffic to his website tremendously, we made a new business arrangement. I am now getting the revenue from the Google ads and if I get enough income from them, I will increase the amount of time I spend on the site. My dream is to work on the site full time.

Below, you will find the final counters of each year from 1997 forward. On this page I am only reporting the annual visitor count. If you want to see details, click on the Go Stats counter on the bottom of most pages . I hope you enjoy the website!

Sincerely,
Ken Rohrer

IAD Website Designs through the years