The Big Idea... (1999 - 2000)

It was the winter of 1999. You have lots of time to think when you are stuck indoors for 3 months during the freezing cold snow period. Anyway, I digress. My new consulting gig was going well and I was making lots of cash riding out the Y2K craze. Somewhere along the lines I had an idea for a website. It was based off an experience I had gone through at that time, and this was as service to help. I don't want to get into the details, since they are not really that important to the story, but I can tell you that it was a type of consumer review site.

Even in 1999, many of the good domain names were already taken. Of course there were still lots left, but most of the obvious ones were gone. I finally stumbled upon a name I felt was perfect. It was unique play on a more common name, which gave it a unique brand quality that I probably would not have found in a more common name. I registered it that night. Mistake number one: I only registered the .com that night. At the time I didn't have the foresight to think I would want the other extensions, or ever need the other extensions.

A few days later I did however register another domain, a very common spelling variation of my original domain. This would later prove to be an invaluable purchase, as later word-of-mouth advertising would often result in a users typing in this variation.

Next I needed a development enviroment to start my project. Nevermind a business plan/model. I was jumping right in. I setup my home PC as a Linux server with Apache and MySQL. I hadn't used Perl before, so I thought why not learn something new while building the site. Mistake number two: I really should have researched more technologies at the time. PHP probably would have been a better choice performance-wise.

With my new Linux web server up and running, I was off to the races piecing together my new site. I spent countless hours roaming the net researching various designs of other sites, both in my niche, and unrelated. I took what I liked from all these sites and started to draft my site. I'm a very visual developer. I like to see things on paper before I build them. In this case I drafted the mockups of the homepage and various subpages. With my design penciled in place, I hacked a functional version of the site out in a few weeks.

xyz.com (beta) was now live and running off my home server, compliments of the high speed Time Warner Roadrunner network...;-)

Next up... Going Live...