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Ten years old today.
Oldclassiccar (OCC) celebrates a notable birthday today, 20th December 2011, as it was exactly ten years ago that the domain was registered and OCC began life.
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OCC's background.
In 2001 the spread of the internet was far less prolific than it is today, and while there were already several sites devoted to matters old-car, there didn't seem to be any single site that encompassed my own interests in classic cars, commercials, motorcycles, toy cars and memorabilia.
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Prior to getting my hands on an IBM PC-compatible computer in the mid-1980s, I started out with a Sinclair ZX81 (1k expanded to 16k), followed by a 48k Spectrum and later an Acorn Electron. The home PC (a Ferranti-built Advance 86B PC-XT clone) came along in 1986 or thereabouts, and from then on I always had access to a PC, either at home, school or at work. In 2000 the idea of building a website gathered momentum, so a plan was hatched to put a site together that concentrated not just on old cars and other road vehicles, but also looking at related collectables and the nostalgia that many people have for motoring in years gone by.
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The original idea, in 2000, was to create a site called WWiredWheels. That though didn't get beyond a basic homepage before being binned. A few months later, in 2001, a simple little site called Jalopy rose from the ashes of WWiredWheels and was published on a free hosting account, using a sub-domain of the hosting company's site. That was in June 2001. The homepage featured a photo of my Mk1 A40, and the tattered interior of a Vauxhall 12 I had owned previously.
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After a few months fiddling with Jalopy, it was time to register a "proper" domain name for the site. Various ideas for a name were bandied about. The domain oldclassiccar.co.uk was finally settled upon, and it was registered in December 2001, a few days after the E83W van site was registered. Jalopy was used as a basis for the new site, and oldclassiccar began to come together. Shown above is the homepage of the original Jalopy site, and a snapshot of OCC in its initial form.
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Over the following few months, articles were added to OCC to gradually build up the content on it. The homepage evolved slowly over time, as the number of articles and photographs increased. A chunk of time was, and still is, spent reading up on the subject of optimising the site to work with the search engines, in those days most users tended to search with Altavista and Yahoo, rather than Google and Bing, and making the site conform with search engine requirements upto a couple of years ago was much more simple than it is today.
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Articles continued to be added in 2002 and 2003. In 2004 the speed of updates increased significantly, and has continued ever since. The forum was added in 2005. Many people have helped out with material that now features on the site - some of the vintage photos for instance have been supplied by kind visitors to the site, as have many of the stories and personal motoring memories that feature here and there. Had I realised in 2001 that I'd still be updating the site in 2011 and beyond, I'd have laid things out differently, but it just evolved from small beginnings and grew from there. While some of my other sites have come and gone, OCC has somehow made it to ten years. How many more years it'll continue is anyone's guess, it uses a vast amount of bandwidth but, so long as people still pop by, hopefully it'll carry on for a few more years to come. There have been more than 5 million page views this year so far on the main site, but more the merrier - and if anyone can help bring more visitors to the site and forum, that would be great.
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The images above show how the site and forum look ten years down the line from the site's birth date. If OCC is still around in another ten years, no doubt it'll look quite different again.
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