One week. From inspiration to inception. One week. Of course... you could just as easily say four years.
I had been a member of this fan community, at the time, for four years. In that time I've seen the slow, agonizing death of the organized web presence that once flourished around Power Rangers. Time was, there were a couple websites everyone went to. If David Yost had a yank in a public loo, you'd hear about it by checking those 'Central' websites. This was because the fandom was interconnected, and information flowed freely from all sources to a common knowledge base.
Fast forward a few years. The Turbo cast changeover. The 'Tolerance' thread. PRLG and PRLR. PR is no longer one story, with one fandom. And that interconnection has faded. Stratification had set in, and suddenly it was a chore to keep track of PR. Between a bunch of mailing lists, the newsgroup, message boards, IRC channels and websites, we had people, each with their own fonts of information, who never spoke, or who were utterly unaware of one another's existence.
Being particularly "on the ball" often meant that you spent every waking moment checking these places for updates, or just knowing enough people from all the various sects to keep general tabs on what was happening.
Derik has always been interested in Web Site 'Theory.' The Tao of Online Utility, if you will. What it ultimately comes down to is that most websites suck. Underdesigned, overdesigned, disorganized, too organized- and generally bad at delivering information. Bigbot.com, we agreed, was our model. A web portal, a 'newsletter' of sorts, keeping track of recent news in Transformers fandom. PR had nothing like it, and it was needed, sorely.
Discussion formed a rough abstract, a 'mission statement' for this completely hypothetical site. A rough HTML test page was hammered out, which Derik titled 'Funaroverse' as a joke.
We launched a week later. The name stuck.
Below is the original site abstract, cleaned up a bit from its bullet-listed origins. Enjoy. Learn. Maybe put some forethought into your own website, it sure worked like gangbusters for us. Before there was El Fuñaroverse, there was simply...
_The Site_
(a proposal)
(a proposal)
We do not like Javascript alerts, animated gifs, or java news tickers on the sites we visit. These technologies, meant to enhance, are used solely to annoy. The Site shall not use them. The web worked fine in the early 90's, when all we had was HTML and gifs under 12kb. So it shall be here. 'Retro' to back before the internet sucked.
The Site does not exist for the validation or agrandization of its creators. There will be no loudly posted announcements for regular updates. There will be no hit counter. The Site will load quickly at modem speeds and five year old systems running any web browser.
The Site will serve one purpose, and do it well. That is to be a portal to PR fandom, a starting point that makes it easier to keep track of. A weekly digest of the significant, the interesting, and the odd. We are under no obligation to provide our own content. Accredation and attribution for those to whom is due. It is their hard work that will make The Site possible.