In three short years the site has grown to be one of the largest online scale model hobbyist communities on the Internet with members from over 90 countries.
(PRWEB) December 16, 2004 -- Founded three years ago as an "experiment" in dynamic content-driven Web sites, Armorama.com quickly out-grew its creator's original conception and took on a life of it's own. Within a few short months the site grew well past the level concieved by the sites creator, an (at-the-time) self-employed Web designer living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Users reponded well to the sites interface and organization, but also to the sense of community which grew from the charter members and still exists today.
"I never thought the site would become such a big part of so many lives" says Jim Starkweather, Armorama.com's founder. "I am thankful too that so many people have donated their valuable time and energy into making the site better each and every day."
Within the first year of operation the site was becoming more than Jim alone could manage. Luckily for him he had based the site on a popular PHP-MY SQL based solution called "Post Nuke". This application allowed him to give access to other registered site users and allow them to manage areas of the site as staff members. Currently the site has over 25 staff members and even more forum moderators.
Armorama.com is also a heavily "international" site. Several non-English versions of the site were also started up in the first year. The sites user interface and articles are available in Swedish, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Russian (with several others in the development stage).
As a testiment to this sense of community, recently a member in Greece had a house fire which destroyed all his model making tools and supplies (as well as many of his models). Almost immediately there was an outpouring of relief and packages started descending on Greece from Armorama members all over the globe.
"The sense of community on the site is very real," Jim added. "When I started the site it was from my past experience with a hobby I enjoyed. Now it is the enjoyment of seeing people connect and share information and ideas that drives me to make Armorama better. We recently added community pages for every country in our database. It allows users to connect with model builders in their country or region and even in their own language. The site currently has topics posted in over 20 different languages."
Whatever the reason, the site is seeing a dramatic up-tick in traffic recently with over 100,000 unique visitors in the month of October alone. For his next trick Mr. Starkweather plans on adapting the Web sites content management engine to run other scale modeling sites to create a even broader range of networked communities.
About Armorama.com
Founded in 2001, Armorama.com has quickly become one of the largest online scale modeling Web sites on the Internet. With more than 6000 registered users from over 90 countries, the site offers scale model hobbyists a place to discuss, display, and interact via online message boards, galleries, and published articles. For more information please visit them at www.armorama.com.
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