What brought you to building your own site?

So what brought you to taking the step of building and owning your own website?

Mine started about 6 years ago, i had built a turbo mustang and felt i had wanted to share my love of turbo cars. I went in with a person and started a site called turborides.com. The site was going really well, we had a great following and we not only had mustangs on the site, but it was opened to all car's that ran a turbo system. After about a year of building the site and establishing a great user following, the person whom i went in with decided he wanted to sell the site. He made this announcement live on the site, without any discussions with me about it. So he put the site on ebay, sold it for $600.00 u.s. and the site fell into new owners hands. As such, i was left without a site to work with.

Since mustangs were my actual hobby and i enjoy owning them (currently 6 in my shop), i decided to build a site around insane mustangs. By insane, i am not referring to the power or horsepower, but the insane love you have for them and are willing to share that insane love. Hence my website insanemustangs.com.

One thing i have refused to do on my site, since my bad experience with turborides, was not to allow advertising. I will not and do not use google adwords or any of the affiliate programs. I do have a couple of site's i allow to sell product on my site, but they aren't paid advertisers, they are hobbyist that just happen to sell ford parts.

Anyways, tell your story........

 

That is kewl man, i often wondered where you got the name from......

 

Most of mine are sports related, so they're obviously centered around teams I like. Others have been building them for a friend and then handing them off.

 

my friend was admin on another forum, and got into an argument with the other admin, who later deleted everything and blamed hackers, cause she wanted to ruin the forum and eliminate the competition to her own, that she had just started. we thought we could do a better job of it. and i always wanted to be staff on a forum, that forum closing gave me my chance

 

schweet......

 

I started with websites for my 3d work, but my first forums were for my extended family. I just hated the MyFamily interface, and at the time I loved phpBB's interface (I was used to it), so I started HaiderBabies and HaiderWeb.

HaiderBabies did well for a while with the expected activity of a family-only forum, but suddenly nothing worked one day...no interface what-so-ever, and I had no idea how to get it back, so I just dropped it. :o

I started AstromechFactory because I hate email lists (Yahoo! Groups), and I knew there were quite a few people on the list I was on that preferred forums.

 

Madness.