21 Years 5 Months

In 2002 Phil Ellison was the President of NMCA. In July of that year Phil proposed that NMCA should have a website and the members all agreed, so the mission now was to learn how to build a website! The internet had become a bit refined, but was still very much in its infancy. Building a website meant learning a very foreign and complicated bag of codes.

Nobody in the club at that time had much, if any, knowledge about how to build a website, nor were there any volunteers to take in this mission. So Phil, being the one who brought this idea to the club, somewhat by default became the web guy. 6 weeks of exploring didn't reveal any great secrets or know-how. But Phil did contact an individual out-of-state who claimed he could build us a website. The expense wasn't high (actual number is no longer available - not without a big search - and then why?)

In September 2002 NMCA had a functioning website. The photo above shows our first "home page". We had grand plans for making this website have a lot of information. But from all of those buttons or links, only a few ever got fully developed. The ability to put event photos up was a big deal, and the Club Info plus Forms links were populated, but it took some time to get those other links to come alive. The foundation for our new website used PHP coding.

In 2005 our website got hacked. By who we'll never know, but shortly thereafter the site was hacked on a regular basis - Phil knew how to reset the website, and when the website was hacked 2 or 3 times each week we knew this couldn't go on much longer. Phil was now working at a company who had an actual IT guy on payroll. For $300 this guy quickly built the website that remains today, with tweaks throughout the years. Phil also got a crash course on building and maintaining an HTML website at the time our second website came to life.

By now Google had become a reliable resource, making available HTML coding to do this or that, and our site expanded a bit as a result. After several months our newest website settled in. Only a couple minor changes were made over the years and the rest, as they say, is history. And more importantly - no more hacks!

So it has been 21 years and 5 months since NMCA's first web presence - and with the same webmaster all that time.

Source: Phil Ellison - NMCA Webmaster

Posted 2/10/23