History of Hawk-Metal webzine
Around the middle of the
year 2002 the founder of Hawk-Metal webzine, Antonio J.
(Hawk), started with the first website building ever.
Then, in the middle of June, the name Hawk-Metal first
appeared as the name of Antonio's personal pages, with
contents typical for one's personal webpages, such as
info on the author, his likes/disikes, and a part where
Hawk added logos of metal bands, together with a section
about instruments. The first version, as can be assumed,
wasn't really succesfull, but already in September the
page goes under a redesign and gets more metal-related
contents. This is when Hawk-Metal forum was first opened,
which was supposed to be a place to hang out for a small
gang that was usually online. But in the next couple of
months, about 20-30 people joined the forum, and that
was really the motive and reason for starting the hawk-Metal
webzine.
The
work on the new design and the mere identity of Hawk-Metal
webzine began by the end of December 2002, and while writing
of contents and creation of the design for the new Croatian
metal webzine were in proggres, a hosting where these
pages would be placed was also searched for. Antonio J.
in the meantime registered a domain name so all of it
could seem a little bit more proffesional, and on the
first day of February 2003 Hawk-Metal webzine was opened
for public for the first time. In the begining there were
some news which needed to be manually entered, some wallpapers,
few band-pictures, a lot of band logos, tabs, metal ringtones
for cell-phones, some pictures and a metal forum, one
of the first two ever opened by some Croatian website
(let us remember, the first was "Inkubator",
and after it was shut down, "Hawk-Metal" forum
arrived). Some of the "old crew" joined the
new metal forum, and so a small community began to form
arround the "fresh" metal webzine.
Through the next couple of months hawk learned new things
regarding HTML and the very beginings of CSS use, and
somewhere 'round the beginig of August that year the webzine
went under a new redesign which looked much more organised
and qualitative than it's predecessor. Here also started
the first adventures with ASP (webzine was then hosted
on a Win2k server), so a script appeared for writing news
online, new content and generally much more completed
webzine. Among the first to notice that were Infaustum
Projects and Moèvara, who assisted Hawk-Metal webzine
and assured first accreditations for "Od Oluja Mrzitelja"
festival and some other concerts in Moèvara. And the a
big misfortune occured, and that was forced shut down
of the forum. That is, free fost on which the forum was
hosted had non-returnably "removed" the forum
database, and all posts, topics and users just disappeared.
Meanwhile,
the need for new hosting based on Linux platform and php/mysql
support greatly grown and by the end of February 2004
a new host was finally found. As Hawk was always keen
on working in PHP (he admited not liking ASP very much),
a month and a half before a new hosting sponsor was found,
a whole new and different Hawk-Metal was under construction.
Totally recoded, designed from the start, pixel after
pixel, a prominent and more qualitative visual identity
of a still young metal webzine was created. A new forum
was opened and all started anew. Then for the first time
came to the formation of "Hawk-Metal" team,
which in that time included only forum moderators. In
only a few months a significant step forward has been
made, there were more and more visits and concert organisators
started to take notice of the webzine much more. Hawk-Metal
began to almost regulary attend to concerts, report and
inform their visitors about them, add pictures from the
concerts in the photo-gallery and so on... Hawk-Metal
webzine became too big for only one man, occasional reviewer
and few forum moderators. So a real Hawk-Metal team was
formed, in which new members were accepted, and who helped
to fill the webzine with new content along with the webmaster.
Conversations about how it would be convenient to have
webzine's t-shirts printed began, and so the Team (with
Hawk in charge) decided to take that huge financial step
and gets official t-shirts made. By now, Hawk-Metal already
got in touch with many concert organizators, Hawk-Metal
even became the official media coverer of these concerts,
and it began to work for the first time with a traveling
agency Urban Travel which organises trips to concerts
inside Croatia and abroad for all metalheads.
For
it's second birthday, Hawk-Metal is treated with a new
design of the webpages, modernisation and new hosting.
New design and hosting this time came under sponsorship
of Hawk Designs, a design/programming studio which deals
with building and hosting of webpages, and owner of the
studio is also Antonio J. (Hawk). So far, Hawk-Metal webzine
had over 150 000 visits and we hope these figures will
still grow, and we'll try to offer as much as contents
and interesting stuff to all our visitors. Stay heavy
& support Hawk-Metal webzine!
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