Today, June 26th, 2009, is Seibertron.com's 9th Anniversary.
For those of you who don't know part of Seibertron.com's origin, let me tell you part of the story. Around the middle of June 2000, I had my tonsils removed. The doctor ordered me to stay home for two weeks while I healed. The night before I went for surgery, my girlfriend broke up with me. Needless to say, I was miserable during the days following my surgery.
At that time, I was still an active artist who loved to draw Transformers. I had had an idea for a Transformers comic series that I wanted to draw and write called "G-One: the Lost Years". The primary goal of the series was to fill the 20 year gap between the end of Season Two and the animated Transformers Movie. Some of the ideas I had included the arrival of the movie characters like Kup, Hot Rod and Ultra Magnus, a battle between the Dinobots and the Predacons, continued stories of the female Autobots versus Shockwave back on Cybertron, defending Cybertron's moon bases from the Decepticon forces, a heartwarming issue between Ratchet and Sparkplug which ends with Sparkplug having a heart attack, building "Autobot City" / Metroplex, and many, many ideas.
Since G-One: The Lost Years was to take place within the Transformers cartoon continuity, I wanted my art style to be as close as possible to that of the cartoon series. I spent the next few days after my surgery trying to take my mind off my pain and my ex-girlfriend by scouring the Internet looking for screen captures of as many of the characters from the first 3 seasons as possible. After a few days of searching the Internet via my dial-up modem (ah those were the days), I had only found about 1300 screen captures mostly of Optimus Prime and Megatron. Back then, screen captures were few and far between and what screen captures you could find were generally of poor quality from old VHS tapes that had been around since the 80s.
Rhino had started to release VHS tape collections of some of the Transformers cartoons in 2000. I decided that I would figure out how to make my own screen captures by purchasing some equipment to hook up a VCR to my computer (a Packard Bell with an 8GB hard drive) to allow me to begin making screen captures of the Transformers cartoons. Within a few days, I had well over 6,000 screen captures.
Shortly thereafter, I decided that I would start a GeoCities website (
http://www.geocities.com/g1archive) to share all of the screen captures with the rest of the online Transformers community. I ended up having so much fun building a Transformers website with the help of Microsoft Publisher (note: Publisher, not even Front Page) that "G-One: The Lost Years" never saw fruition. I soon forgot about my sorrows and had successfully turned a tough point in my life into a very positive junction. The rest is history. The origin of Seibertron.com is a good story about how you can take a negative in your life and turn it into a positive.
Fast forward 9 years, and now Seibertron.com is one of the top two Transformers websites on the Internet. Over 30,000 to 50,000 people from around the world visit this site daily ... almost 500,000 unique visitors per month. These users generate 250,000 to 400,000 pageviews per day - almost 10 million pageviews per month! It's currently ranked in the top 30,000 websites on the entire Internet.
Here are a few interesting facts about Seibertron.com's launch 9 years ago:
* Beast Machines Season 2 had just ended in Canada when I started Seibertron.com. Season 2 didn't air in the US until two months after I launched Seibertron.com.
* I started working on Seibertron.com on a Packard Bell computer that I had purchased in 1998. This computer only had an 8GB hard drive.
* No high speed internet for the first 2 years of Seibertron.com. 56k baby!
* I owned about 350 Transformers when I first started Seibertron.com. I now own around 3,000+.
* I wasn't even a programmer yet and was still selling cars in Grand Rapids, MI. Seibertron.com created a career in programming for me that eventually lead me to my life in Chicago.
* Bill Clinton was our President. Vice President Al Gore was running for President against Texas Governor George W. Bush.
* Seibertron.com was launched almost 15 months prior to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.
* The first Transformers reissues from Takara hadn't been released yet.
* The most recent Transformers figure I had purchased online from a relatively new online store called BigBadToyStore.com was Car Robots Fire Convoy. I received him a few days prior to my surgery in June 2000.
* The online Transformers world was a little different back then. The big TF sites in 2000 were bwtf.com, bigbot.com, tfarchive.com and unicron.com. alt.news.transformers was still a very active community. tfw2005.com was about six months old at that time. Seibertron.com and TFW2005.com would later become the world's two largest and most popular Transformers websites.
* I bought the domain "seibertron.com" for $150 back in September, 2000. Today, you can purchase domains online for $10 or less.
* Online videos were few and far between back in the days of dial-up modems. There was no YouTube or iTunes. Napster was still the big way to download MP3s.
* Google was relatively new to most people online.
* My first use of the term "Seibertron" for a creative project was for a different Transformers comic book idea I had back in 1998. This series was supposed to bridge the gap between the end of Marvel Comics #80 and the debut of Marvel's Generation Two Transformers comics.
* Did you know that Seibertron.com's predecessor was a fanzine called "Trans-Forum". I launched the first issue of this "tranzine" back in May, 1996, a month or two prior to my first BotCon. Trans-Forum ran from 1996 to 1999.
* The live action Transformers films weren't even a blip on our radar for another 3 years. News about a possible live-action Transformers film first surfaced in June 2003. The second Transformers live-action film was just released a few days ago.
A lot has changed in the 9 years since the debut of Seibertron.com. I'm now a homeowner, engaged to my beautiful fiancee (who I met in Chicago a couple of years ago), and we have a gorgeous 2 month old daughter. I hope all of you will continue to be a part of Seibertron.com and that you'll be here for our 10th anniversary next year and beyond. It's been a fun journey thus far and I'm very proud to own this website. As my good friend Q (aka Ultra Magnus on Seibertron.com) always says to me ... "Seibertron till we die!"
Here's how Seibertron.com has evolved over the years:
2000 (Located at
http://www.geocities.com/g1archive/, screen captures and COTM debuts, does anyone have a screen capture of the old G1 Archive?)
2001 (forums, caption contest and Before Carly make their debuts)
2002 (based off Playboy's design, screen capture galleries by episode debuts, forums switch from UBB boards to phpBB)
2003 (sofachrome logo launched in late 2002, HMW and Vector Sigma Database roll out in 2003)
2004 (based off VH1.com's design, Toy Sightings and Toy Galleries sections debuts in 2004)
2005 (G1 box style design, you got to choose an Autobot or Decepticon theme)
2006 (my first attempt at trying to get away from using tables for the design)
2007 (designed by my good friend Diablien, first time Seibertron.com was designed by someone else)
2008 (completely tableless design, layout driven entirely by CSS)
2009 (current design)