Fish in the .Net (a history 1999-2003)

(by theAquarian November, 2003)

Fish in the .Net didn't look like much when it started. Much like the African Peacock cichlids, the site started with a grey and black color scheme instead of the beautiful colors you see now... But I'm jumping ahead. FIT.N actually started in mind somewhere. I woke up in the middle of the night and had this idea of doing a fish club online. The next I took my idea to my wife, and she really didn't get it. The thought was to have a help society where people who ran into trouble with their fish would be able to share thoughts and ideas. And so it began.

Fish in the .Net was initially a Front Page driven site using Tripod as a free host called "The Aquarian's Net." The year was 1999, the month was November. I settled with a black theme that wouldn't last all that long on the site. The first major section added was a state section that included all the states in the US, but very little real info.

2000

Early on in 2000 I started adding fish guide with different fish pictures and information. Initially I spent a lot of time trying to get into webrings and do other things that would "bring traffic" to the website, instead of focusing on actual content on the website. I worked hard on the website, but didn’t get any major content onto the site during the first several months of the year 2000.

In May of 2000, I added the first Buyer's guide. The intent behind these guides was to help people get a better feel for what different products were available, and how well each of these products really worked. I continued adding 3 buyers guides and several polls during that month. I also reworked FP to create my first forum. It ended up being completely un-used, but it was an important first step.

June of 2000 I continued a torrid frenzy of work on the site, adding myself to more webrings, creating 3 more buyer's guides, writing 2 articles and adding a feedback mechanism to each of the fish guide pages. The biggest thing for the month was the writing of the first of my Fish Keeping 101 series. That article series ended up being one of the best search engine hit creators on the website.

By the end of July 2000 I'd written through part 4 of the101 series, and added an article on shell dwellers. More importantly, I redid the visuals on the website to a dark blue. The dark blue would become the background and visual basis of the site for 2 years.

August brought me a new job and much less time to work on the website. I did however add the Fish Compatibility Chart, javascript navigation to the fish guide, a sortable table to some of the buyer's guides and I started to see that Tripod was not going to work for hosting the website.

September of 2000 brought about 3 articles, including the one on building a habitat for the Freshwater Moray Eel. At the time, before the boon of digital cameras, I was the only website with pictures of the animal that was most commonly considered to be a myth.

In October I started playing with the visuals again, and in November as the site hit one year old I went with the "fish orbs" in the navigation. I also added all the rest of the buyer's guides, expanded the Fish Guide to over 30 fish and started a discussion board using YaBB. That discussion board would fail, but I would try again, and the YaBB discussion board would become the basis of the website.

In November I also bought www.theaquarians.net domain and started hosting that domain at Hypermart. Pets.com failed, which hurt the site significantly as the money from their adds was helping me to start branching into paid services. I bought a $200 digital camera so I could take pictures of fish for the website. I started a campaign to have 100 fish in the Fish Guide by the end of 2001. November of 2000, the website broke 9,000 page views in a month for the first time, meaning there were over 300 page view per day.

2001

In January of 2001 we said goodbye to Tripod and jumped over to the new server. (though you can still access pieces of the old website if you know the addresses at aquarians.net.tripod.com)

In February and March of 2001 I slowed down work on the site a little bit, I added several articles and reviews and after a fight with PetSmart we got our own coupon, AQUARIAN, that was usable at PetSmart for $10 off of $30 for a few months. I also added the games section, which is a section that is still with the website today.

In April 2001 I added two articles and a final exam to finally finish up the Fish Keeping 101 section, and I added a final exam for kicks.

May 2001 was a terrible month. I was forced to leave Hypermart when they decided to change their policy on bandwidth, cutting our bandwidth in half. The site had grown large enough by that point that we could not survive with 1/2 GB of bandwidth a month. I refused to sign their new agreement and had to find a new host. We moved to ADDR so we could get 3 GB of bandwidth a month. (Just for consideration/comparison, now in Dec of 2003 we use more than 1GB of transfer each day) After all was said and done we were up on a new host in a new place, though there was a short consideration of closing the site down when Hypermart first told us to sign or be closed down, but those thoughts didn't last for long.

In August of 2001 we again set up a discussion board on the website. This discussion board was our first real discussion board as when we moved to our current discussion board we migrated all the info from the old board. The reason for the move was that we were receiving many pop-up ads on the old board, and I've always wanted to do whatever was possible to remove the ads.

In October of 2001 The Aquarian's Net got its first full-time helper. AJB started taking care of the forums and he wrote several articles for the website. His patience, and willingness to make the site more of what it could be were greatly appreciated.

November has always been the month I judge traffic in, and in November 2001, we hit 30,000+ page views, meaning we had averaged over 1,000 page views per day!

2002

January of 2002 marked my 3rd top 10 list of the prior year. I write about it here as it was the first time that I actually had people requesting the article after I fell a little behind and didn't have the list finished at the end of December when I usually put it up. It was nice to see that people enjoyed the list enough to write me about writing it and to know that people were using the website regularly.

February of 2002 was another terrible month as we moved to Tera-Byte due to continual problems with ADDR. Due to the work they did on the servers, I was forced to reload the entire website several times in the short 7 months that I was actually using them as my host. Interestingly enough they came back and offered to host the website for free this year. (Sometimes no matter of customer support will make up for all the mistakes a company makes)

Throughout 2002 I kept adding the occasional article, but I tried to focus mostly on doing reviews of various products. One of the reviews I did, was of the TetraTec Power Filter, this review was poorly received by Tetra and lead to a series of emails with the head of customer support at Tetra. After a few threats on their side, and then some very good conversation, I made a few changes to the review and they backed off.

April 2002 was a big month for the website. After a lot of thought we decided that "The Aquarian's Net" was just too hard to remember. So the quest began to come up with a new name between me, my wife, and a good friend, Bryan Lovell, we played with ideas for hours and then came up with Fish in the .Net. Bryan Lovell is an artist, and was kind enough to design the current logo. Using that logo as a basis, I redesigned the website, keeping the blue background and the navigation, but changing to the "wave" layout.

May of 2002 was a big month as Diver_J, who would become the heart and soul of the discussion board joined the board. Soon thereafter he was made a moderator and has been a huge influence on making the site the friendly location it is for sharing information.

In August of 2002 we had another great Moderator who also had a penchant for plants who wrote some more articles about plants for the website. Between her articles and those by AJB we completely set-up the plants article section.

October of 2002 was supposed to be the beginning of something new with a 210 series of Tropical fish-keeping as a follow-up of the 101 series. I also redesigned the look of the Fish Guide, though it was apparent that the guide needed much more than a facelift.

November of 2002 was the best month of page views up until that point. I was using two different web counters during the month, and got very different results, but the one I cared about showed that we had hit over 100,000 page views per day for the first time ever. That mean more than 3,000 page views were occurring each day. In 3 days we would have as many people visit the site as visited it the entire November of the past year.

December of 2002 passed somewhat uneventfully, but it was the month that the techno person of the site, Pyrowolf joined the group, and that was a major happening. We also then started talking about doing a new fishguide.

2003

After a few more articles to finish of 2002, we stopped updating the website in 2003 and moved to www.fishinthe.net beginning in January, though we didn’t make the full move until a little later in the year. The new website was another redesign and was based on the popular PHP Nuke webnews program. There wasn’t a redesign at that point, I just converted the waves theme over to PHP Nuke with disappointing results. Using PHP Nuke and mySQL as a basis Fish in the .Net was ready for a new era! In January of 2003, Pyrowolf began demo-ing the new fish guide, in March the dream of a new interactive Fish Guide became a reality.

March 2003 also was the beginning of the website as we currently know it. Pyrowolf used inspiration from the old website and created the new design. We started using the new phpBB forum as the basis for the forum, never expecting the huge increase in usage that we would get and moved over to selectedhosting.com, which after a terrible run with Powweb.com seemed wonderful even though the site had major outages every month with the new host.

In May 2003 after much discussion with what had become a large and very helpful group of moderators, including most of our current mods such as Mak and luvsfishes, we decided to launch the Fish Guide Contest. This was the most ambitious thing that we’d done to date, and it cost more than $200 to run the contest and pay for the prizes given to the contest winners. The upside was that the contest was a great success, increasing the number of fish in the fish guide from under 20 to over 100 in just 4 months!

October saw the website move from Selected Hosting to Ducky Designs, marking the 4th website host that the website had been on this year! We also formed and alliance with PlantGeek.Net as we felt it best to send people with questions about the planted aquarium to an expert!

November 2003 saw another milestone in traffic as we averaged 9,000 page views per day, a 300% increase from the year before. The upside to having so much traffic on the website has been that there is always someone available to chat with or to ask a question of. As we hit four years since I first came up with the idea for the website, I paused to reflect that my dream has mostly become a reality. Thanks to the wonderful help of many people and the continued interest from the community, FIT.N will continue to grow as new dreams light our way into the future!

 

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