Back in 1995 I created the first on-line photo magazine, Photon. It was
incredibly successful, relative to the era. It was in the world's top 5
websites and indirectly resulted in the £1.5m Euro-money grant which
gave Scotland its first big Pipex 'backbone' - our site was responsible
for the majority of all bandwidth being used through the Edinburgh hub
as it then existed (before broadband). Photon altered my life, because
it was so outstandingly successful; we changed the title of our magazine
PHOTOpro to match it, went monthly, took on six staff, and thought the
future lay in the website.

But this was before php, before *everything* really, and I just created
a plain HTML site. No-one registered, we had no advanced stats or
anything, and the service providers were simultaneously greedy (would
have wanted thousands of pounds to implemented any such things) and
jealous (our site occupied 95 per cent of their server's capacity and
all their commercial clients had their pagehit stats dwarfed by Photon).
You had to scroll down hundreds of entries before you could even spot
one of their own site figures. We did not pay them to create the site, I
did it myself in BBEdit and HTML 2.

Once the grant was secured for the new Pipex capacity, they demanded
£25,000 a year to continue the service and of course we couldn't pay. We
were summarily removed from the 'funded' regional server, and forced to
transfer the domain and space elsewhere. No-one really knew how to
ensure our high ratings (Yahoo was then the main search engine) stayed
put, and with full-time staff now dependent on the overall success of
Photon, we were in trouble. We had no email addresses for any of the
30,000 regular readers (doesn't sound much now but it was then). The
website went into downspin once removed from our local server;
adminstering it became difficult; the new server was unreliable, updates
could no longer be done by ftp; we moved again - it got worse not better.

No large commercial ISP would consider us at this point because of the
large number of good quality large JPEGs. We sold Photon to
www.photoshot.com in 1999, ceased to publish the magazine monthly,
joined forces with the BFP and relaunched the mag as Freelance Photographer.

From five years of work - two very successful and three fighting
against problems we didn't understand, which would now be overcome in
minutes - we had absolutely nothing from Photon, except our database of
printed magazine subscribers. We had no email list and that reduced the
value of the site by 80 per cent; all we had were the usual website
stats, and they were not validatable or detailed. We couldn't contact
our readers, and nor could the buyer of the site.

Failing to have a simple, free registration process probably cost us all
the potential Photon ever had. The f2photo site can never even be a
shadow of what Photon was, as there's no income from it (Photon
attracted worthwhile advertising and hundreds of magazine subscriptions
a month before) and I can't justify two weeks a month running it, or pay
anyone to do anything now. But with the registered email list we do at
least have the ability to reach genuinely interested readers.

f2photo.co.uk will probably disappear in the next few weeks, as the new
owners of f2 magazine don't want it to continue as a website, and they
are not ready to have any web presence. We will move all the archived
pdf articles, newsfeed, etc to the Icon Publications domain. We'll
continue - definitely - to ask for free registration and at some point I
may begin a monthly e-news letter.

David