History of Fishing in Wessex
Fishing in Wessex was first published to the web on March 2001, and has undergone some changes in appearance since then.
The older versions of the site can be seen if you're interested at the history of the internet site www.archive.org and search using the http://www.fishinginwessex.com domain name there.
The site was initially an all HTML site built using netfusion objects version 5. The site was hosted at www.oneaneone.co.uk for £4.99 a month under a hosted package up until February this year. The site now hosted on a dedicated server package that I have with oneandone along with some of my other sites which currently costs around £30 a month.
The growth in traffic to the site as it developed can be seen in the following graphic. 
The final figures at the time of the migration to the server were;
| Type | Total Accesses | Sum of Bytes | Average Accesses | Average Bytes | Last Hits | Last Bytes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accesses | 2,020,019 | 2,496,207,227 | 16,422 | 20,294,367 | 53,156 | 43,301,614 |
As the amount of information grew on the website, it was becoming harder to keep up the management of the site in the pure html approach. This was because a small change in style on one page, would need replicating across the whole site. This was mainly down to a poor initial approach, but also I felt some better way of managing the data might be a good idea, especially for the news and diary sections.
This lead me to look at various Open Source CMS packages, and mid last year I used Mambo Open Source Server for the local news part of the site combined with the Netfusion 5 Html pages I still had. This wasn't a bad approach, but I felt it looked fairly boring and it was difficult to change the default appearance without a lot of code changes in the package. I also felt I needed a CMS package that allowed for a layout that was not typical of sites using these types of packages (eg Slashdot, PostNuke) which give a very samey type of look.
During Feb to May 2003 I set about trying out the various options, including typo3, ezPublish eventually settling on WebGUI, which the site is currently being run on. At the same time I decided I needed to create an application for the site that allowed the local clubs, venues etc to be listed in a database that would allow visitors to search through. For this option I've been writing a custom script for the site. It is still only new and needs some improvements (You can view this under the Fishing Resouce link from the main menu).
As of August 2003 I am still moving the data across to the new look website, and hopefully in a month or so all the existing articles will be in place with a few new ones.