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About Snowmobile Fanatics

We hope you've enjoyed your visit to our website. We've worked hard to bring you the best of the best here. Ever since Snowmobile Fanatics was started in the middle of February, 2001, we've been trying to bring to snowmobilers what others were lacking. This is a place of freedom for all snowmobiliers. It's a place where you don't need to take all that BS that some people intend they must dish out to other snowmobilers over the brand they choose to ride.

Ever since the beginning we've been improving things, and this is the latest and greatest from us. You'll notice, from reading below that our website design knowledge was very limited at first, but eventually got better. Today Snowmobile Fanatics is one of the leading hot spots on the Internet for snowmobilers to gather, share thier stories, thier knowledge, show thier sled to the world and ask questions about problems with thier sleds. We plan on moving up, and thank you for helping us get there.

Why Start A Website?

The reason this website was started is because I was experimenting with web design at the time and thought it would be cool to start a better snowmobile site. I had been previously visiting Polaris-Man's site a half a year before this. I liked the site, liked all the cool pics and all. Well, Polaris-Man started a forum. He had some kind of pre-made forum hosted on a weird server and that was going good. All of a sudden he must have found this different forum software and threw together a different, much better forum on a free hosting account that included .asp. So, I visited many times a day, chatting and having fun. The forum was pretty popular. I even remember backing up Polaris-Man in a post where someone got mad at him. I said he worked hard to bring us a forum, and we should be happy for that. And he was like, yeah...thanks...I will handle it. So, from there on I kept posting for another month or so.

I already had a personal geocities site I was messing around with, and set up this really stupid forum, I had been learning more and more about websites and decided I wanted my own domain name. On a day in late February, 2001...I purchased snowmobilefanatics.com I had been taking a computer art class in school, so I did some graphics for it, threw up a site that had really nothing on it, and called it good.

How Snowmobile Fanatics and Polaris Files became a joint venture - The ULTIMATE Snowmobile Forum

My website was new and I didn't get hardly any traffic. I was looking at Polaris-Mans's forum one day and noticed it was some special forum software....I decided I would try set it up at my site, after a couple days of frustration, I had a forum!! I even had a member that posted!!!! It was SO cool. In mid March 2001, for some reason...the host for P-Man's forum just died, he lost everything and was without a forum. I was regularly visiting the support site for the forum software and P-Man also visited there. I was confused as to where his forum went. In a message at that board I was looking for help to add an alternate login, all of a sudden P-Man chimes in. The exact words are stated below.


And his reply was..


The exact post is here.

With these words, the forum began construction. We decided we didn't want to do things the regular way, and didn't know where to put a single forum so we devised a plan of a dual interface forum. Up until then, I had only heard of one other person making such a forum, and an outburst of these questions from me and P-Man were posted on the support forum. We were getting there, slowly but surely....we were getting it. We stayed up VERY late many nights, working until 3:00 in the morning. I believe you can still find the first post here.

With all this said, we finally were able to get something off the ground. The forum started out very slow, and it wasn't until the following winter that we actually got some action here. We decided on the no brand bashing in the very first month the forum was in operation. We have stuck by our word from then on.

Some Of The Firsts

• First topic EVER on this forum
• First SnowmobileFanatics.com Topic EVER
• First PolarisFiles.com topic EVER

Site Design and Revisions

In the beginning, early 2001, I had just started to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop. I was also using Microsoft FrontPage to edit the site since I knew nothing about HTML programming. The design used a frame page for the sidebar. It was very simple, consisting of a logo, box menu, and text background. I had previously heard of, and used, forum software from the folks over at Snitz. I decided to set up a Snitz forum of my own. The forum was independent of the entire site. There was no integration and things were not easy to use. I was happy that I had gotten a site off the ground and I don’t know how many countless hours I spent tweaking the logo and design. Since I didn’t know anything about programming I focused more on the design aspect. This is what I’d call the first version of the site. It was a very crude start, be we all start somewhere, and I did the best job I knew how to do.

After being contacted by Polaris-Man shortly after the introduction of the site, we jointly started working on a new site. This is the second version. You can see how this came about by reading that section. Since there was a new site I worked on a new layout. I don’t know what the reason was but I left parts of the new forum a dark red color. That, mixed with the blue, made it look terrible but I didn’t think so at the time. The new theme was part of two different themes. Polaris-Man had the same forum on his site, different theme, but with the same content. This was when the “dual forum” partnership began and the member base that we have now began signing up.

Near the end of summer 2001 and into the fall, I started work on a completely new design and layout which took advantage of newly learned techniques in Adobe Photoshop. This is the third time I was doing a major update to the site. The original half moon logo and “Snowmobile Fanatics” text mad it to the header banner and I used images that changed color as you hovered over them. I considered this to be something very fancy. I changed the homepage to allow for dynamic content to be automatically added and updated. New forum posts went on the homepage, a poll, and site news which I added via the database instead of statically editing the page. I tried for a consistent look and feel and thought I had achieved it but looking back now, I was very far off from that.

In late 2001 I made some changes to the look of the site but the forum remained very much the same. I was working on, and finalized, a version of a new circular logo design. I implemented it into the header of the website and changed some things on the homepage. I consider this part of the third version of the site since it was such a minor update.

In the summer of 2002 I worked on some other design stuff, frequently changing the site. I will call this the fourth major revision period of the site. The look changed considerably from the one before. The header featured a “jagged” border and integrated login. The homepage changed as I tried to work on some sort of layout that worked well. It was not easy. There was a forum upgrade, as usual, and some other small changes. These changes did not last long.

In the fall of 2002 I began working on the fifth major layout and design of the site. I used the recently designed circular SF logo as the starting point and designed the site based on that. The colors were typical of the site; white, gray, and blue. I decided to experiment with some lighter colored blues in the design. This is the first version that had a real consistent look and feel across the entire site. This was a big plus because before the introduction of this design there was no consistency and things seemed very disorganized and difficult to find. Traffic continued to increase and we were impressed when we had as many as 50 or 60 people online at a time.

In the fall of 2003 I began working on the sixth layout and design of the site. Again, this was another major redesign and upgrade. I spent a couple of months doing the design and upgrading the forum. I wanted something that reflected cold weather, snow, and ice. I changed from the dark blue color completely and focused on a lighter blue, which I though complimented this “snow and ice” theme better. It was a bit lighter and seemed easier on the eyes. I was very pleased with the results. It incorporated the circular SF logo. Overall, I received many positive compliments on the layout and organization over the previous version. This was the first time I built the site and actually knew what I was doing, in a sense at least. This is also the first time we see the gallery as we know it today. Once this design was released I started building a gallery application from the ground up. I later implemented it into the site. I also changed the way files were uploaded and added to forum posts, making it easier and quicker for members to add images.

In 2005 I launched a version of SF codenamed “SF2K5”. This would be the seventh major revision of the site. I spent more time working on this revision than I had any previous to this. It was a huge job. A new design / layout and features were added. This would be the first design to incorporate the new “SF” swirl logo instead of the circular one. The circular logo was ditched and things were designed with the new logo in mind. I wanted something “edgy” for the layout, something that appeared to have a faceted design with many angles. You can see what I’m talking about from the screenshots below. SF2K5 stuck around until the end of summer, 2007, which was the longest I’d ever had a single release of the site up at one time.

In the spring of 2006, work began on a new site yet again, working on what would be the eighth revision. This time, instead of the customized Snitz forum, I decided to build a site from the ground up using the ASP.NET framework and C# as the backend language. This proved to be more difficult and time consuming than I had first anticipated. I was new to the language and all the techniques involved so it was a never-ending learning process. I dedicated most of my spare time for a year and a half learning, building, and testing. The new system allowed me to do things I’ve never easily been able to do before, including many features that utilize AJAX technology to make the site faster and easier to use from a users’ perspective. For this design, I focused on creating something that “flowed” well, was clean, easy to navigate, and visually pleasing. In incorporated reflection effects, transparencies, and other “glassy” interface items. All said and done, new features were added and the entire site was revamped. In the fall of 2007 the new code was launched, but not without problems. With the help of users promptly reporting issues and countless hours later, most of the bugs have been worked out and I am now working on finishing and adding additional features. The site is faster, far more stable, and more flexible than it has ever been.

Past Designs