Looking back: the evolution of KUAM.COM

I'm lucky in that as a devleoper, I've been focused on the same project for six years. My company's site has gone through several aesthetic and functional revisions over the years, including major rewrites of our codebase, brief flirtations with Flash, and an adoption of n-tier architecture with caching layers. We've gone from simple design to elegant software architects in the interest of user demand for content, multimedia and multiplatform accessibility that grows geometrically.

I've done the web shop thing where I work in an environment not only touting the quality of work put out, but also the quantity. I never did like fattening a portfolio and telling people I've done 15 sites in a year. When I took over the reins of KUAM.COM in late 1999, I knew I wanted to commit myself to a single web project and really watch it grow long-term. It's been a fun process watching the site develop from something I knew had potential into the dominant player it is for local news, entertainment and information. It's become the region's most successful and popular online brand, and it's because of the tireless effort my crew and I have put into it - equal parts technical excellence and guerilla marketing.

Using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I'll take you on an interactive tour of some of the major developmental milestones we've gone through at KUAM building our beloved online baby. Hang on for the ride.

• December 7, 1998 - KUAM.COM hit the web, having been designed by Alex Sian and featuring streaming video of nightly newscasts and reporter bios. It was a big deal locally at the time. The image (which probably won't load) is an image map of a big KUAM-branded remote control pointed at a TV. Nice work.
• April 21, 1999 - the site started to adopt interactivity, profiling management and marketing KUAM Radio as well as the flagship TV side of things. Note the perfunctory contact info footer.
  
• February 29, 2000 - by this point Alex has moved on to bigger things, and I've been consulting the company for several months after hearing that they wanted to go more into producing online news. I eventually get hired full-time to run web operations. Good thing, because the old brochureware concept was getting really old, really fast. I laugh at how crazy web designers were about the free or FrontPage hit counters.
  
• May 11, 2000 - I officially switched the domain to a new host, as evident in the DNS error. Our new site went live the next day on May 12 with about 75 total pages for news, sports, editorials, downloads, reporter profiles, job openings, etc. We got a million page requests in the first six weeks - a plateau we eclipse now in about a day and a half.
  
• November 10, 2000 - our site having been up to rave reviews for six months, we started handling news publishing, exhibit downloads, and RealVideo webcasts of our nightly news. Check out the (ugh) overuse of applets, DHTML tickers, mangled color, and within the page's source an abundance of META tags for pre-Google search engine recognition. We're publishing news the next day by manually doing the "File...Save As" thing in FrontPage 2000. It was at this point I started realizing the importance of automated data management, not just presentation. I take up ASP 3.0 and ADO scripting.
  
• February 5, 2001 - we tried a mid-morning stream webcast that never really took off (check the Matrix-esque Flash teaser), both from an internal production standpoint (too laborious) and sales point of view. It got lots of views, though. We;'re still manually copying stories from our newsroom system into FrontPage - note the page-naming convention I used under "Today's Hot Stories". We also start using an AvantGo mobile channel to allow portable access of our stuff on Palm OS PDAs.
• October 27, 2002 - our traffic levels were so high our Access back-end couldn't handle it and would freeze up. We quickly began getting quotes for other hosts and began working on an ASP.NET codebase to account for scalability. I've been working with the ASP.NET betas for about five months.
  
• November 8, 2002 - I've upscaled all 600 of our stories from Year 1 into an Access 2000 database, which now feeds content to our homepage dynamically (contrast the query string-based page URLs in "Today's Hot Stories" to those in the previous entry). We're publishing everything via web forms, which allows us to publishg stories in synch with our broadcasts, the same night. I also ripped off the alternating row background color from a DreamWeaver plugin. At this point we're right on the heels of the primary local election, we displayed results in a Flash movie and did more shameless self-promotion in the rightmost column for several new data services I've developed. Microsoft awards me with the first of two Most Valueable Professional (MVP) awards for ASP/ASP.NET.
  
• December 16, 2003 - with aggresive marketing now driving tons of traffic to the site, our Access DB can't keep up. I switched us to ORCSWeb for hosting, imported 1,600 news stories into a SQL Server 2000 database and implemented our C# codebase for ASP.NET v.1.0 pages with SQL Server running the back-end and extensive, but not exclusive, use of XSLT to transform admin XML content pages, giving it more of a network feel. Content was now managed in Arpeggio, the codename I used when writing our internal CMS. So long scalability problems.
  
• December 25, 2005 - here we are today, on the fringe of Web 2.0, using RSS, web services, Windows Media streaming video, RealServer live streaming radio, image galleries, VOD, podcasting, WAP mobile access, SMS, public APIs, beta communities, and a ton more. Our publishing volume's gone way up, as we're putting 5,500 stories online per year. We've won what I hope will be the first of many regional Edward R. Murrow Awards as "Best News Web Site" for Guam, California, Hawaii and Nevada from the Radio and Television News Directors Association.