The City of Perth SLSC website celebrates its tenth birthday this month!

Back in 1997 I transferred with work to Geraldton. Toward the end of the year, I began to contemplate a summer existence which, for the frst time in my life, wouldn't be revolving around City Beach and the surf club. I joined the Geraldton SLSC, but I still wanted to find a way to maintain an association with City.

At the same time, I was part of the new revolution of people getting on the Internet (remember what life was like before that?). Like everyone getting online for the first time, I wanted to see websites about things in my life (and which might even have my name on them!), so I decided it was time for the City of Perth SLSC to have its own website. Not many surf clubs had websites at the time, and I wanted City to be one of the leaders.

At that time, I had not the slightest idea about how a website was put together. But I found a few sites that said they could teach you how to do it, and set to work learning.

In its first incarnation, most of the site content was around club history - State and Australian Championship winners, Life Members, a bit about City Beach, patrol statistics and not much else. The club history book was a handy resource!

I scanned a few photos from the book and from the 1997 States, and the site went online at the end of October 1997.

The original look of the site was quite plain. Sadly, I didn't keep any of those original pages, but I did find the following: a page from the site as it appeared in December 1999.

And the front page from May 2001. The main page had been in pretty much this layout since the first day.

(One single page remains on the site that is still in the old original layout! Can you find it? First correct answer to The Orb might win a prize!)

Page updates were pretty infrequent, and tended to be mainly the adding of further club history - either old stuff from the history book, or major events as they happened (such as Australian medals or club Life Memberships).

In June 2001, I decided it was time for a new look, and adjusted the site to the red heading and side guttering. With a few minor adjustments along the way, this look remains today.

It was in February 2002 that I decided to make the website more active, with regular club news and updates. The site became the place for club members to find out what was going on around the club. Stories didn't have to be major club events any more, they just became whatever was going on.

November 2002 marks a milestone for the site - that was when the club actually registered our own domain name of www.citysurf.asn.au.

The last major change to the look of the site's front page came in October 2003, with the installation of the club Webcam. The current webcam image went in the top corner, and the news story and photo were reduced a little so the "Coming events" section could be brought in.

In the last ten years, the front page of the site has been visited more than 180,000 times. The counter went in on day one, and although it's probably not 100% accurate it gives a pretty fair indication of how important the site has become.

The site gets about 130 visitors every day at the moment. The webcam page regularly attracts over a thousand visitors per day, and recently clocked up it's one-millionth hit.

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