Purplemath is an online website which contains lessons from various topics of algebra, and has a forum board for further assistance. The website also appears to have a partnership with WyzAnt and directs students to that and other various sites for paid tutoring. Purplemath is often cited in many math books and is referred to in textbooks as well. History Purplemath 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 and 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. The name "Purplemath" was chosen and registered. A few years later, "Purplemaths" (with an "s" at the end) was added for the benefit of British-English speakers. According to Quantcast, Purplemath served about six million pageviews to nearly two million unique visitors in September 2012. During the North-American school year, Purplemath uses as much as 600 gigabytes of bandwidth in a month, serving as many as three hundred fifty thousand pageviews in one day to more than one hundred forty thousand unique visitors. (Fewer pages are served during the North-American summer break.) The average visitor comes to Purplemath directly from a search engine and reads three topic-specific content pages.
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