Splitcoaststampers News

A Little More About Us (part II)

In which I give you the (albeit, brief) history of SCS, so that I can tell you a bit more about where we're going.

Note: this article started out as a simple attempt to explain more about what's in store for SCS in the days ahead, but has since grown to epic, book-length proportions. I'm presenting it therefore as a series of articles. Yesterday, in part I, I explained a little more about what we're attempting to do with the gallery this month.

A little history
Let's go back to the very beginning, and we'll see how long and drawn out I can make this.

Splitcoast the site was started nearly three years ago by Daven (that's me) and Tracy Nolta. I've worked for the last 10 years as a designer and programmer of multimedia software and web sites; Tracy besides being a long-time SU! demo is also an elementary school teacher.

Tracy was looking for a better way to support her downline of demonstrators both in the Northwest and also back east (from a two-year period that we lived in Erie, PA). She had chosen 'Split Coast Stampers' as her SU! group name, representing her family of demonstrators both here and back in Erie, so we went with Splitcoaststampers as the name for the site.

I looked on the web for stamping-related sites that I assumed must be out there somewhere, and was amazed by what I didn't find. I found many, many sites devoted to scrapbooking, and some good stamping sites, but no stamping sites with the community aspects that I was searching for.

I wanted our site to feel comfortable, and be a place where people could find inspiration and timely information. Because computers and the web can often feel impersonal, I also wanted to promote a community feel to the site and to let people see that real people created and managed it.

Good design is important too. For Splitcoast that meant a lack of clutter and distraction, easy to find your way around (still working on that one!), no ads that are distracting or annoying, and a friendly personality.

Launch
The site launched in early 2003 with Tracy's downline and friends as our first members. We had registered the splitcoaststampers.com domain name in October, 2002 (October 1, as a matter of fact; happy anniversary to us!) and then needed several months before we had enough of the site in place to be able to welcome registered members.

I did everything related to development and maintenance, and it was quiet around here. Tracy and I populated the gallery with scans from swaps, pictures from events, and her own creations. We began getting a few uploads to the gallery as word got out just a little bit.

Membership grew gradually (we've never spent a penny to promote Splitcoast, anywhere) and before long we were getting daily gallery submissions. Still almost no forum postings though, and I openly worried about it in some of my early posts. I could have told you exactly how many members we had on a given day, and I often sent personal messages as new members joined.

Acorn
Like the little acorn that slowly grows, we began getting more and more "regulars" to the point where some days we had up to 30 members online at any one time, and hundreds throughout the day. I was thrilled!

I began hearing from our members almost daily with comments and questions, including quite a few from one of our most prolific uploaders at the time - Beate. That eventually lead to Beate doing tutorials and helping out with gallery approvals and bringing her friend Jennifer Balcer along too.

Jenn relieved me of day-to-day management of the gallery, and we turned off the automatic e-mails that notified one of us each time a new card had been uploaded - they were starting to fill up the inbox!

The wild, wild web
Early on, the site was run on a shared hosting plan, no different than any other of the millions of sites on the web. By February of last year we'd outgrown the available hosting plans that our service offered and I moved the site to a new provider.

Our traffic continued to grow, and on April 1, 2004 I received a note from customer support at our new provider. "Unfortunately it appears that your site is using more than your fair share of system resources on your hosting machine...we need you to trim down your usage considerably." I looked for an "April Fools!" at the end of the message. Not there! I contacted them, incredulous. This was a little site done in my spare time, it couldn't possibly be the culprit in "consuming too many resources", could it?

They suggested something called a "dedicated server". Well, yes, I'd love to have my computer be "dedicated", sir. Yes. That sounds wonderful.

I contacted Tom and begged him to help me figure out what to do. But the choice was already inevitable. With my provider threatening a complete shut down of our site, we took the leap and moved to a dedicated server. Our own computer, dedicated to running nothing but splitcoaststampers.com? How cool was that? Our problems were over! Yeah, right.

Part three: Family? Oh yeah, I have a family!

Posted by: daven on Sep 30, 05 | 12:00 pm

A Little More About Us (part II)

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