Happy Birthday! 12-04-09

Happy Birthday to us! www.AndrewWKMusic.com was launched one year ago today! 12-04-2009. We’ve accomplished a lot in the past year and we’ve made many friends along the way. A fansite couldn’t survive without fans, so we thank you! We mean this quite literally. We’ve had the next year’s worth of hosting paid for ($120!!!) by generous administrators, fans, avid readers and partners. Let’s look back on the year to see what we’ve accomplished shall we?

Original Website

Today we thought it would be fun to re-open the archives to show just how far we’ve come. Some may not know this but AndrewWKMusic.com started out using the Google Sites web-service. For those that have been around since the beginning, they will remember that its life span was about 6 months old until we shut it down and migrated here 1 year ago. So for the first time since then here is how the original website looked in its entirety as a primitive website to this one on the day we shut it down: https://sites.google.com/site/awkmusicbackup/.

Statistics

To date we have 67 Facebook friends, 258 Twitter followers. We average 35 subscribers to either our RSS or Email subscriptions. People came to our site 16, 216 times and 11, 215 were unique visitors. We had a record breaking 1,735 visits to our site occur in one day on October 5, 2010. By far the top page visited was our news section (what you’re reading right now). 97 different countries visited the site, the top ten being:

(the number is the amount of visits)

And

To see an exhausted amount statistics view this .pdf file.

Highlights of the Year:

• We have earned countless endorsements from Andrew himself.
• We conducted exclusive interviews of Sgt. Frank and Rich Russo from the AWK band.
• We discovered and re-released new sourced masters of the We Want Fun LP.
• We re-released a 04/05 documentary entitled Meeting The Band.
• We had our very own videographer recorded the historical Ask Andrew W.K. Anything event held in New York City.
• We made available for the first time countless mp3s, Promos, Singles, bootlegs, b-sides, live concerts, and extremely old and rare music from related bands.
• We found and archived the Your Friend Andrew W.K. TV show.
• We documented countless AWK news related stories and events.

Site Development

I dickalan (the webmaster here) became a fan of Andrew W.K. during the Jackass era of Andrew W.K.s career. It was 2005 when I finally became involved in the fan scene and from about 2005 to 2007 I grew increasingly more active as a member of the official AWK forums. Over those years, due to some of Andrew W.K.s legal issues and career choices I saw many loyal fans drop out of the scene because of their disappointment in whatever. It left many of the original I Get Wet era and The Wolf era fans MIA. Ironically, and for whatever reason, this is when I really increased my involvement there and have continued to increase it up until this present day.

Although the official forums were and still are a great source of information and it’s a relatively friendly community, over time I became dissatisfied with the members sentiments of only talking about AWK. I felt like this was in contrast to the older fans motives. So being inspired by them and rather than complain about the current members un-willingness to take productive actions, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I decided to take action! For instance, by 2009 many fan sites including AWKShare.com and Dontstopthenoise.com had been shut down recently or had already been closed for a number of years. This is when I saw the need to fill the role, so I filled it.

However, there were definitely more qualified AWK fans at the time, especially in regards to being experts on various AWK subjects. Also, I knew absolutely nothing about website development. Despite this on June 11, 2009 at 5:39 AM I launched https://sites.google.com/site/andrewwkmusic/ on the Google Sites service. Being a free and incredibly basic web content management system it was the perfect platform for me to learn the ins-and-outs of web design on. After awhile I began to see the many limitations of this platform and probably so did the visitors while comparing it to more modern websites. I searched patiently for months in hopes to eventually graduate the site. Six months from its launch date we closed up shop Dec 7, 2009 @ 1:26 PM and we opened up www.AndrewWKMusic.com, December 4, 2009 @ 11:43 AM. For the past year our old Google Site address has been re-directing traffic here. But for nostalgia purposes we have backed-up that site to how it appeared 1 1/2 years ago. For the first time since then you can check it out in its entirety here: https://sites.google.com/site/awkmusicbackup/. Its funny to see how far we have come! Overnight we even earned acclamations from Andrew himself. We now enjoy a much more robust website, with many features.

The Future

As you may or may not have noticed the website has continually morphed through subtle changes. Recently we have re-structured the website to accommodate its ever expanding content, with simplicity. Were happy with the new structure and believe it to be easier to access certain areas of the website and know exactly where you are at. Were currently contemplating many new ideas to apply to the website, including a fully functioning social network and a member only platform in accessing the site.

New content is obviously expected and the admins have high hopes in tons of great content throughout 2011!!!

Thanks for visiting, come back often and spread the word!!!