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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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