Back in early 2001, I was searching the Internet for information on Australian theme parks. While I found great sites on parks from the US Europe and The United Kingdom, I was only able to find 2 sites on Australian parks. One was 'Dreamworld Mapsite', a site I found very interesting. The other was on Geocities and was an unsuccesful attempt to focus on all Gold Coast theme parks. Around June, I started playing around with the idea of making my own Aussie theme park site.
I looked around at sites, which would take submissions of info on international parks. To this end, I was successfully able to add Seaworld, Moveiworld, Dreamworld and later, Wet 'n' Wild to www.themeparkinsider.com.
With that, I searched the Internet, to see what sort of standard a website on an Australian park would have to have. I was able to find a whole host of unofficial theme park sites. Most sported a black background, the name of the park in yellow writing, and contained information, which would easier be found on a discussion board. Most appeared unprofessional, and would dedicate page upon page to a SLC, or a boomerang, which happened to be the parks signature coaster. One site even had the statement, "The views and opinions expressed on this site are mine alone and are not necessarily those of Six Flags or anyone else". I've never heard of an opinion that didn't belong to anyone.
Feeling I could exceed the efforts of other unofficial sites, I decided to create only the second site based on an Australian theme park. The first site covered Dreamworld, and showed all the maps in the history of the park. Its one of those �must visit� sites for all people in Australia who claim to know about the theme park industry. Seaworld was my park of choice to cover, over Dreamworld and Movieworld for 2 main reasons:
One was my knowledge of Seaworld was far greater then any other park, and felt that Seaworld has been unlucky in the past not to receive more publicitly on the internet..
Second was I was hoping the site would appeal to the international community as well as Australians. I had reasoned that hearing about a Seaworld in country other then the US would interest more people. This has worked, but not to the level it was originally hoped. Most visitors appear to be international visitors, but most only visit 3 or 4 pages.
The site was constructed with 2 things in mind: Fresh, new information, and easy navigation. On 27th of September, Seaworld Online was born, which was easy to navigate, and most of the information is found no where else on the internet..
It became apparent after the site was online for less than 2 weeks that it was far too messy, and on the 10th of November the site was given a face-lift, and had a name change to Seaworld - The unofficial guide. I later discovered that there are very few theme park sites that do not have 'Unofficial guide' as part of their name, so it was changed again to 'Seaworld Resource' on the 28th of November. Beyond that, who knows? I can tell you that there are some exciting things being planned for the site, and not all the ideas at the moment are based on Seaworld. |
