Owning and Operating an Online Parenting Website
I started A Mommy’s World back in 1998. At the time I had two children and was married. I wanted to have my own online parenting community to connect with other parents. I was new to being on the internet but it all made sense to me. I started out by opening up a Yahoo club. Then it expanded into fifty or so yahoo clubs. I went all over the internet inving moms to join my website. Later on, Yahoo clubs were converted by Yahoo into what they now call yahoo groups today. I did not really like how everything was so split up and I really did not like the Yahoo groups. I decided to explore my options and soon found Ezboard. I then had to convince my members to register an account with Ezboard and join my website in it’s new location. I was able to add as many forums and I wanted, all in the same community. This was more of what I needed in the first place. My website was growing rapidly and I needed a good place to host it. Ezboard seemed to be a good place for my website for a while, that did not last long. Ezboard is very pricey, as your community grows it gets even more expensive. Ezboard is also a very glitchy website, slow at times and also often spams members. I met another mom online and she had her own hosting space through a hosting company called ipowerWeb. I had recently purchased the www.a-mommys-world.com domain name. I had it directed to the Ezboard I was running for my website. The friend suggested that I let her install a PhpBB bulletin board on her website and then direct my domain name to the page she installed the PhpBB forum on. I thought it over and decided this was a wise choice and generous offer indeed. I then had to once again notify and coerce all of my members to come register a free account at my new PhpBB bulletin board. I now had my own REAL website. This was very exciting to me. I really loved connecting with all of the moms and dads online. I made many lasting friendships and was able to feel at home and enjoy myself when I had free tme to be online. I did not have to go by anyone else’s rules and was able create what I thought should be available for all the moms and the few dads that were on my website. I am not a very conventional parent or person for that matter. I suppose you could list me as a gothic mom if you really had to label me. I prefer to just be called Kristen or “Kat” though. Back to what is really important, my website.
A Mommy’s World grew and expanded very rapidly and I was proud of it every step of the way. I was connecting parents and giving them a safe, friendly, fun, hip online community to talk and chat about anything their hearts desired.
I offer online arcade games, role playing games, a chat room, eCards, a large gallery of animated images and clip art, and forums to discuss everythig you can imagine to do with parenting and every aspect of life. Including entertainment.
The website did have it’s ups and downs in the beginning. The friend that set me up with the PhpBB bulletin board forum on her hosting space was not all that skilled in running a bulletin board or database. We had many technical issues. She tried her best to keep the bulletin board running correctly but this can be a very difficult task for anyone. The website was broken and lost fourteen or fifteen times. We tried many types of PhpBB forums. I had to keep asking my members to register again and again. I ended up then purchasing my own hosting space with ipowerWeb. My friend then moved my website over to my new hosting package on it’s server and database. That was a lot of work. I lost many members but most of them followed me back to my website and never gave up. I had made some amazing online mommy friends. This made my heart grow warm and more fond onf my wonderful empire, A Mommy’s World. Soon my friend discovered that there was a new kind of bulletin board forum. Simple Machines Forums. She installed this forum for me and then converted my website and databases all over to the new Simple Machines Forum. This bulletin board forum did not have as many features as the PhpBB forums had however it is a great bulletin board forum.
This time was golden, no one had to register again, they were already registered because the conversion worked well and moved all the content of my website, including the database of members and forums over to the new bulletin board forum.
The website was really taking off but we started running into a lot of snags. The website was running slow, and it just kept getitng slower and slower. My members were frustrated and so was I. My friend left the site and went off on her own ventures and I was stuck with barely any knowledge of knowing how to operate a database and forum. I had to learn and I had to learn really fast. It was do or die. I decided to do. I was not going to take my website this far and then just give up. As the old saying goes, “there is no crying in baseball.”
Where as I am not running a baseball game, I thought that made a good segway to the next chapter fof the A Mommy’s World empire that is here today. Rome was not built in a day, where as A Mommy’s World technically was, it took a lot of time and effort and long hours of work to get it to where it is today. Steadily and rapidly growing and getiting millions of hits a week., I had to do something. I could not let it just die.
So I delve into the database and the FTP to really see how things run, I did some poking and prodding and soon it all came together. I was now able to really start running my own website. It is a lot of work but so is any job. Something that really makes a difference always requires blood, sweat, tears and frustration. I was doing pretty well with A Mommy’s World all by myself but it was still really slow and I was in over my head. I was drowing in my own megabyte empire. I would soon become pixelated and fade out into cyberspace if something amazing did not happen soon. I needed a miracle. That miracle actually arrived in the form of Lyric Powers. The wonderful woman that would become my new best friend. I had been poking around online inviting new members to join my website, this is what I have been doing for years to get my website to be what it is today. I have made many wonderful friends by just asking random parents on the internet to just come register and try out my website. I have not always gotten the nicest responses from people when I have sent them an invitation to my website. However, 95% of the invitations I have sent out since 1998 have been welcomed, delightful responses. I have been thanked repeatedly by many parents for inviting them to my website. This makes me feel very warm and fuzzy. Everyone needs warm and fuzzy sometimes. Now back to Lyric Powers. She did not say something nice to me right away about my invitation to her, to join A Mommy’s World. She infact informed me that she found my invite in her email spam box and just decided on a whim to check it out. She then informed me that my website was a mess. She said my design skills were outdated, which they were. She also said it was really hard to read the pages on my website, they were hard on the eyes. So we got to talking on Yahoo messenger. We discovered that a member on my forum, was a good friend of hers. Then Lyric decided to give me a few pointers, we talked and talked and talked. She decided she wanted to help me out. We became friends. I then appointed her as my newest Executive Administrator team member. We then got to work. She helped me figure out what to do and how to do it. With the help of my wonderful, dedicated and intelligent, admin team and staff we worked hard. We made more changes to my website than I can even remember. Unfortunately my website was still slow. Very very slow. We talked things over and decided I needed to seek out a new hosting company because the slowness of my website was not any of our faults, it was our hosting company. I then found another company that fit the needs of my website better and from then on, after a grueling week of moving the website to the new server and database on the new host; we were back on track Finally!
Lyric, my staff and I all worked hard once again to get the website all set up in the best way it could be for the most efficient usage. Now my website was finally fast. We still work hard daily to keep the website running efficiently, but it is all worth it. We now have a wonderful online parenting community that offers so much more than just parenting advice. You may ask why I call my website an empire. That is simple. I have set up and online community on Live Journal, and another online community on MySpace. I also set up a prodile for my website on MySpace. A Mommy’s World offers a message board community with 500 forums, an arcade, a role playing game, eCards, a large gallery of avatars, a cafe press store, clip art and animated gifs, journals and blogs, a home page area, and more things than could could imagine. You will just have to check it out for yourself.
I thank myself for treading into and unknown territory, and I thank all of my wonderful online momy friends who helped me get A Mommy’s World to where it is today. You cannot have a community with out the members of the community. I owe them all a really big hug and a thank you.
Congratulations to all of us for making A Mommy’s World keep on trucking for all these years.
