The idea of creating a website first came to me (Scott Wilson) as I was surfing the internet on the 2001-2002 Summer school holidays. I had no experience with making websites, and had only just begun using the internet, but I was anxious to learn how to create one. When I saw an add for free websites, I surfed there and immediately signed up. The only problem was - I didn't know what to make my website about. This was answered easily enough. The thing that interests me most in life is rugby league and it was either a website on my favourite club - the Cronulla Sharks, or my favourite player - Scott Prince. I decided that creating a site on an entire club would be too hard and, more importantly, too time consuming. So that left my other idea and I began work on my Scott Prince website, known as the Scott Prince Fan Site.
After a bit of tinkering with the controls of Geocities, I learnt how to do all of the things neccessary to make a decent webpage. Then it was down to business. After working out what features were in other good player websites, I implemented them into the Scott Prince Fan Site and created a few of my own - such as the statistics, magazine articles and game reviews and previews sections.
The majority of the site was ready after about two days. This was because I had spent about six hours on both of those days working non-stop on the site. In those two days, I had written every piece of material on the website, without a single word taken from other articles or profiles on Scott Prince and that policy - of everything being written by myself or someone else associated with the site - still stands today. I added the finishing touches to a scrappy site in the next few days and started adding it to different search engines - like Yahoo and Google, in the hope of attracting some visitors to the site.
The first big thing that happened was when Mike Thompson signed the Guestbook of the Scott Prince Fan Site. He offered me his services in banner making and design and quickly became a trusted friend and brilliant banner-maker. He is now a joint webmaster with me on Prince's Palace. Another key step was getting Aron Lal to become a helper on the site. He provided me with a news article and I hope that there are many more to come.
After the site was up-and-running, the only changes neccesary were my adding of various news articles to the news room, as it is now known. When Mike and I had the site how we wanted it and there was nothing to do - we realised a change was needed. That was when Mike added the entrance page and brilliant banners to the Scott Prince Fan Site and I re-designed the frontpage to make the site more user-friendly.
The site had continued on its' merry way since its' inception to the internet world on the 14th of December, 2001 until Mike started making Prince's Palace. As I said above, his brilliant banners and designing skills that were such a great feature of the Scott Prince Fan Site were present at Prince's Palace but after starting the page, his schoolwork piled up to the state that he had to stop and that is where I stepped in and continued the new site. While I added all of the content to the site and wrote everything for it, without Mike's help this site may never have eventuated so I must thank Mike for his help and hope we can continue to make the site better than ever.
So that is the story of how the Scott Prince Fan Site came to life, changed, matured and improved before metamorphising into this better version known as Prince's Palace. I have enjoyed every minute of making both sites and hope to continue doing this for a very long time. Thank you. |
