© Nick Smith
UKClimbing.com's web boffin Nick 'hard drinking, hard coding' Smith has been hacking away at the technical side of our website for exactly 10 years today.
Commenting on his blog, Nick said:
"Any large website is naturally a team effort, and UKC in 2009 is a professional affair, with top quality news, reviews & articles, well supported by the climbing industry, and most importantly, a thriving horde of regular users who contribute to the forums, photo galleries, logbooks, ...
While UKC was already popular back in 1999, the site is almost unrecognisable 10 years later. When I joined the team, UKC was a small, essentially static, site.. It had 20,000 page views in June 1999....
...10 years on... It has 6.7 million page views (excluding images) and over 170,000 visitors each month. Far more than just a popular discussion forum, every part of the site has real depth of content."
Nick has really made his mark on the site with his in-house forum system that is central to UKClimbing.com and has been courted by many other large websites.
Other innovations from the Sheffield-based climbing code-cruncher have been the UKC Logbooks system and the essential advertising system, that lets our advertising partners manage their accounts swiftly and easily.
- You can have a look around the advertising site here: UKC Advertising
© Jack Geldard
Nick wrapped up his blog post on a positive note:
"It's tricky to summarise 10 years of hard work - there have been so many aspects of the site that have been great to work on: from clever little bits of design that help improve usability, to major ground breaking new features like the Logbooks system, and from building a framework to help the editorial team produce their top quality content, to custom-written advertising systems that help pay the bills.
Through all its major changes, I think UKC has managed to stay true to its roots (ahem) as a site for the climbing community, and its success and loyalty of users is testament to that.
I'm looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years will bring."
In the pipeline for UKClimbing.com is a new Video section on the site, meaning UKC will be hosting our own video content, giving us more flexibility in terms of resolution/quality and size, as well as making us less reliant on other video sites such as Vimeo. After the video upgrade we are having a major overhaul of the home page... watch this space!
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