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GBWS, The Gary Barlow Website (also
known as the Gary Barlow Appreciation Pages) was in existence for
two years before becoming part of GB FANS, below is a short account
of it's history.
The Gary Barlow Website has
quite a long history! Julia Wharton the webmaster of GB FANS and
also GBWS first came onto the internet back in January 1996. After
getting in touch with a few Take That fans from around the world,
she started to experiment with making websites.
In The Beginning.......
Delighted that she could master the technique, she soon established
the Take
That Appreciation Pages and it became the most visited website
for TT fans on the net. It has since suffered a data loss due to
the server it is located on and is nowhere near as good as it was
in the beginning of it's life.
Once the lads had split up,
Julia developed a sister page for the TTAP to be called the Gary
Barlow Appreciation Pages. At first it was more or less still part
of the Take That Appreciation Pages but it soon grew so large that
it had to be located to it's own web space. Being the only website
dedicated to Gary Barlow at the time, it enjoyed a great response
from the fans of Gary on the internet.
Julia, meanwhile was still
learning more and more about how to make web sites and so as she
progressed, so did the pages she created. During the first part
of 1997, she was contacted by Kelly Howe who ran the Take That Discussion
List (an email based discussion originally formed by Ang of GBML).
As they became friends they
realised that they could be a great team working together and soon
the Take That Discussion List, went online and became The award
winning Gary Barlow Discussion List (GBDL). The GBDL was a brilliant
forum for discussion designed by her husband Tim Howe and nothing
like it (we believe) had been seen on the internet to that day.
Members were able to join up automatically, submit their posts and
even change their member profiles if they wished. More importantly
it was creating a community of fans that all joined together.
Julia and Kelly began to work
more in line with each other and made their sites 'as one'. The
look and feel of these two separate sites was as if you were visiting
one whole website. You could access the media pages from both the
GBAP or the GBDL.
They soon enjoyed more success
when Arista began to help them out with information about Gary and
provided merchandise for competitions etc. The GBDL website address
was even included on the Arista and BMG (Canada) promotional 'teaser
cards' that Gary signed on his trips to the US and Canada. Kelly
was then granted an interview
with Gary whilst he was on a trip to Washington near to where
she lives.
GBWS is born.....
Due to the success of both the GBAP and the GBDL, Julia and Kelly
then decided to take the big jump and merge the sites completely.
They worked on the merger for over 5 months at the end of 1997 and
were due to go online in January 1998. Because both sites were merging
they decided to change the names completely to The Gary Barlow Website.
The GBDL programming that
needed to run the discussion forum was located on Tim Howe's work
server, and due to problems with it's server the GBDL went off-line
in December 1997. He worked hard to restore it but unfortunately
it turned out that there was little he could do to reinstall it
and get it running again.
The type of programming that
he had designed was incompatible with the server that the GBWS was
moving to, so the GBDL went into an untimely early retirement.
On 25th January 1998, the
Gary Barlow Website was finally launched minus the discussion list.
An amazing new design which got praises from everyone.
Soon after, Kelly Howe decided
to take a break from managing the website with Julia and sadly went
into retirement from the GBWS, however she is still designing
websites of her own and for other people. She dedicated a lot of
time and energy to GBDL and GBWS to which we are extremely grateful.
New Beginnings
Julia was left alone for a while to run GBWS by herself, she installed
a new Discussion Forum to replace the old GBDL, although not quite
as sophisticated as it's predecessor, it was just as popular and
has become a regular meeting place for fans to get together and
chat.
A new service was also begun
by Julia, the GBWS Newsletter which gave website readers the chance
to catch up with the latest news and information from the site via
email, once a month. A great opportunity for those people too busy
to regularly check out the website. By the end of GBWS' time, it
had over 1,000 subscribers. It is still in service however, and
is now called the GB FANS
Webzine.
After a while, Julia realised
that running this very busy website by herself was too much to handle,
so she welcomed on board Trine Okholm as her new website assistant.
Although Trine wasn't that active in her role at the time due to
plans for the merger with GB FANS, she is now fully in board and
will be taking on a much more active role in the maintenance of
this website.
All throughout this time,
Julia had been kept busy not only running GBWS and her son's very
popular website but also assisting Jan in maintaining the original
GB FANS website too. Julia and Jan discussed things and it was decided
that to ease Julia's workload GB FANS and GBWS would merge, bringing
Jan on board from GB FANS, making an even better website than ever
before - GB FANS The Gary Barlow Website!
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We
have plenty of our own GB FANS merchandising for
sale. Check it out and put your orders in for the
brand new up and coming 2000 calendar plus lots
more!
There
are many things going on in and around the GB FANS
world. Check out our
