site history

The first time Empire Earth NetCenter got online was on July 9th 1999. But it wasn't an all-new project. It all started with one of jb.design's projects, The Game Domains. One of the sites in The Game Domains was Empires Domain, a site covering Age of Empires, Age of Kings and Empire Earth. After a time of success The Game Domains went down and was officially abandoned and therefore also Empires Domain.
But from the day that The Game Domains and Empires Domain went offline to never come back a new project was formed in Joffe's, one of the two people behind jb.design, head. Soon he decided to start working with a new project that he named Empire Earth NetCenter. It was to become a site that served the Empire Earth community with everything it could possibly need.
Even before the site was officially released, Jordie, now the Content Manager, heard about Empire Earth NetCenter through rumours and wrote a mail to the Lead Webmaster and founder, Joffe, asking him if he could be a part of Empire Earth NetCenter. And the reply Jordie got was, of course, positive.

Although, not much luck came with this project. Before the year 1999 started, a design for Empire Earth NetCenter was completed and ready to be started. But at that time another big game site was taking all the time, Quakers Domain. Other projects got higher priority and the number of jb.design's clients was rising. Eventually, due to major connectivity problems and other administrational miseries Quakers Domain suddenly went down in March 1999.

Eventually, Empire Earth NetCenter was rediscovered and the project started again. It was decided that the site needed to be redesigned even though the current design never had been seen in public. Time went and eventually the site was done and ready to be released. Problems with finding hosting delayed the release of Empire Earth NetCenter and it took a long time before it was released.

First, in July 1999, Empire Earth NetCenter was hosted at jb.design's server space.
Shortly after the release, an affiliation with Empire Earth Trade Center was formed and the two largest Empire Earth sites started working together to serve the Empire Earth community. Deals with the developers, Stainless Steel Studios Inc. made it easier for Empire Earth NetCenter to better serve the Empire Earth fans.

After running only two months, the site went down and the people behind the site almost panicked. But after only a few days of hard work and administration, the site was back up and running again. Shortly after this downtime it was decided that the site once again would be redesigned.

The server the site temporarily was hosted at didn't support the new design and wasn't good enough for Empire Earth NetCenter's needs. During a quite long time of administration, a host was found, Strategy Planet. But after just a few days of setting up the account and testing the new site, it was found out that Strategy Planet didn't support domain name hosting.
After this a new host, Stomped, was asked and they immediately agreed to host us. Once again, a long period of site testing, administration and development passed by.

When Empire Earth NetCenter was redesigned and moved, an administration unit was formed at Empire Earth NetCenter. It is called EENC Admin and has got the responsibility for the development and administration at Empire Earth NetCenter. The members of EENC Admin are people from the Empire Earth NetCenter staff, chosen by the Lead Webmaster.

During all this time of administration, designing and development by the EENC Admin, the Empire Earth NetCenter visitors had to wait and satisfy themselves with the old site where hardly any news was updated. The only people allowed to visit the new site during development and testing were the staff at the affiliate site, Empire Earth Trade Center, and Stainless Steel Studios, along with other VIP guests chosen by the EENC Admin.
The reactions from the people who saw the new, improved Empire Earth NetCenter was 100% positive. New technologies that were used made the site easier to update. This means that the site from its move to a new host was able to be updated on a daily basis, often several times a day if needed. New information, more features and resources were also introduced with the new site.
Development of a news engine also started as the new host was found but the EENC Admin decided to release the new site before it was done. Although, development proceeded.

The Empire Earth Yellow Pages was taken down as the site was redesigned. The EENC Admin decided that there was no need for a registry over all Empire Earth sites when there was only four Empire Earth sites on the net, including Empire Earth NetCenter. Although, the name Empire Earth Yellow Pages was kept behind the scenes to maybe be seen again in the future.

In the middle of November 1999, after being officially online with the new site for about a week, a domain name was registered and set up. The new address to Empire Earth NetCenter was now www.eenc.net. The EENC Admin was very satisfied and continued their work with the news engine to get it done as soon as possible.

One of the goals set by the EENC Admin for Empire Earth NetCenter was to always develop the site. During the first week the site was online, an IRC channel was registered, information about the epochs in Empire Earth was released and the development of the unit info made great progress and was released a couple of weeks later.

In the beginning of December 1999, Christmas decorations were put up. The feedback on the Christmas site was also all-positive. Empire Earth NetCenter was chosen as one of the best-decorated sites on the net by one of Sweden's largest computer magazines.
During the time before Christmas, new info was added to the site. Such information as disasters, civilizations and resources was added and released and the unit info was also constantly updated. Still, most of the work was made "behind the screens".

The first day of the new millennium, a news engine was taken in use although it wasn't the one developed by the EENC Admin since they decided to quit the development of their own news engine. And just a few days later, the whole file system was changed from SSI to PHP3. It was also this week that the new feature, .plan updates, was officially announced. The EENC Admin also started to form a contest while adding features such as search and mailing list to the news engine and looking for the best possible .plan updating solution.

About a month passed by with regular news updating and nothing special happened. Although, the EENC Admin found it hard to offer .plan updates since Stainless Steel Studios use an NT server and there are no good NT finger servers. Still, the quest continued.

By the end of January 2000 it was decided that a new site was needed to be able to offer more and interest more people in the game. There were a whole lot of different designs made but finally the Lead Webmaster/Designer decided to take one of them. When the first beta was done, the old EENC was put down. News was still updated and behind the scenes, there was major development going on. The new site looked totally different but Joffe, Lead Webmaster and also the designer/developer wasn't satisfied. What EENC needed was a special developed updating system allowing any staff member to update the entire site, except the design, through a web based administration area. He wanted each staff member to be able to update from any computer in the world, as long as it was connected to the Internet.
Soon, the right solution was found. Databases. The Lead Webmaster started the development of a totally new web based updating system using the programming language PHP3 and MySQL databases. At first, development didn't look very bright and hardly anything worked. But stubborn as he is, Joffe kept on working and finally, the system took a few insecure steps. And soon, it was all up and running. During several weeks of improving and continued development, some VIP guests were invited to take a look at the site and all reactions were very good. New features like a contest, voting booth, posting comments on the news and much, much more made people very satisfied.
During the long time of development, there was news posted at the temporary site. Many times, the visitors were tempted by status updates and the revealing of new features. There was even an unexpected increase of visitors during March even though there was just a (boring) temporary site with some news on it.
Another thing that made the new site special was that it contained 3D artwork made by Steve Ashley, Digital 3D Artist/Animator at Stainless Steel Studios. Without his artwork, the site wouldn't have been what was.

The new Empire Earth NetCenter was divided into four different sections: NetCenter, FileCenter, ClanCenter and SiteCenter. At the scheduled release, May 1st, the NetCenter and the FileCenter were to be released, the other ones had to wait since there wasn't any need or any audience for them. NetCenter was to be the main site with the game info, features, news from the other sites etc. FileCenter was to be the download site with file news and tons of files.
The purpose with ClanCenter was a site for all the future clan members and online players with LAN party lists, player lists, clan lists and maybe clan hosting. SiteCenter was scheduled to become a search engine with all of the Empire Earth sites on the net indexed. Although, as stated above, only NetCenter and FileCenter were to be released on May 1st. No release date was scheduled for ClanCenter and SiteCenter at that time.

The EENC Admin also started up an advertisement system allowing other sites to advertise on the EENC sites, either by paying a fee to the EENC Admin or by displaying the EENC banner at their site. This advertisement system was implanted during the development of the new site and were to be taken in use on May 1st.

When the release was coming up, the Empire Earth publisher was announced. It was Sierra. Sierra also opened the official Empire Earth site with new screenshots and that put some pressure on the EENC staff. But the problem was solved: the new screenshots were put up on the temporary page in wait for the release.
In the last week before the release, an article about the new site was written and an interview with Josh Buck (3D Artist/Animator) at Stainless Steel Studios was made. These were released on May 1st.

The release was a big success and lots of people visited the site. There were a lot of new features released, information revealed and screenshots released. But the site that was released on May 1st didn't hold for long. No, very soon Joffe changed some small things to make the site look better. He also developed the system further by adding new features that made article, interview and review writing easier. Site updates were also shown on the main page and the screenshots page was developed to show how many screenshots there were in the database.
And this way it still goes on. Almost every day Joffe is there changing something. Therefore you shouldn't be very surprised if you find that the site has collapsed, it's just Joffe toying with a new feature.

In the beginning of June, the development of the search engine for Empire Earth SiteCenter started and very soon a useable beta was done. Unfortunately, the production stalled since so much paper work showed up for Empire Earth NetCenter.
The EENC host, Stomped, changed their hosting agreements as they formed an alliance with CNET Gamecenter. All hosted sites had to carry banner advertisement and the CNET Gamecenter logo and weren't allowed to carry their own banners.

In this mess, the advertisement system had to be thrown away and the Advertisement Manager changed title to Promotion Manager. A new newsman was also hired and he turned out to be quite a resource, always finding the news first.

While holding a contest, lots of feedback came in and most of it pointed at one thing: forums at EENC. So Joffe went out to find the best system and found it in Phorum, a PHP-MySQL based discussion forum. A new section was opened at Empire Earth NetCenter, called Empire Earth ForumCenter. It immediately turned out to a success and there were over 50 posts in less than a week.

Soon, the production of Empire Earth SiteCenter, the search engine, started again. It was decided that it would also host quality sites since it already hosted one site, Steve Ashley's CV.

Steve Ashley's site was redesigned and the new look was released together with SiteCenter, the search engine. SiteCenter quickly turned into success since it was the place where you could find all the information concerning Empire Earth. Once again, Steve Ashley made some fantastic 3D artwork (the screaming SWAT soldier in the top left corner) for the site.
About the same time as SiteCenter was released, a system that showed the status of each member was developed. From now on, people could see which Empire Earth staff members who were active or on vacation and so on. When this was introduced, the "Quality Site" feature was removed, and the poll was replaced with two search boxes, one for SiteCenter and one for searching through the news archives.

The one-year anniversary was celebrated on July 9th, while Lead Webmaster Joffe was on vacation in Greece. But before he left, he wrote his chronicle (the way it should be).

The forums were hot and many people posted their thoughts about Empire Earth there. Things went on smoothly with casual releases of new units from Stainless Steel Studios. During this time effort was also put into the IRC channel. #empireearth on server irc.stomped.com got its own bot through the new staff member Marauder X with the position as Forum/IRC Operator.

A few weeks after the anniversary, the host Stomped made a heavy decision. Empire Earth NetCenter didn't fit in the Stomped Network with almost only 1st person shooter sites. And since Empire Earth NetCenter took a lot of power from their server with advanced database systems, it had to leave. Two stressful weeks was given until the site would be removed. The EENC Admin acted quickly and after two days, the site testing on a new server begun. Testing went good and after a bit more than a week, the domain name was transferred.
For another week, the forums wouldn't work. But after a lot of work and effort, they started to function.

The development of the bot for #empireearth was proceeding through the move and it was also decided that #empireearth would get its own IRC server during the upcoming autumn. A web based IRC client was also put up on the site for those who didn't have access to an IRC client.

The web moves fast. In the middle of August, it was decided that a server, dedicated for Empire Earth downloads was going to be introduced to the visitors of Empire Earth NetCenter. The day after this decision was made, EEfiles.com was up and running with about 50MB of Empire Earth movies, wallpapers and chat clients for chatting on #empireearth.
Through this new service, a new staff member was added to the staff. Spoon, the former webmaster at EE Madness was Empire Earth NetCenter's new Download Manager. He was also the one to contribute with the server.
The file server was also constantly filled with goodies and new movies were put up the very same day they were released.

The next big thing that made Empire Earth NetCenter the best Empire Earth site on the net was that it was announced as the official Empire Earth Clan Listings. To serve this title, the development of Empire Earth ClanCenter started and went very well from the start. Unfortunately, server upgrades were required for the new systems to work correctly.
Instead, the possibility to register your name for ClanCenter was announced and many people registered the first week. Registration for clan names was to show up later.

At about the same time as ClanCenter was announced and development started Jordie, the Content Manager, started to work on new forums for the site and they were released at the same time that the registration for ClanCenter was opened.
The new forums were very liked and functioned perfectly. Sadly though, there weren't very many people posting at the forums. But this changed within a few weeks and the forums quickly turned into the most active in the community.

An Empire Earth Game Play trailer was released after the summer and EENC was in the news at all the major gaming sites, being the first site to provide the movie for download except the official site. During the rest of the autumn, the development of ClanCenter proceeded and a few new sites showed up on the net. Besides that, nothing special happened.
Christmas and New Year was celebrated without anything special happening except the release of new units and new gaming information. Around Christmas and New Year, EENC got three new staffers: Nehkara, Gandalf and Neph. The were all three hired to take care of news posting and staff writing.

In the beginning of 2001, EEfiles.com was taken down because it was using up to much bandwidth for the server host. After long negotiations, both parts agreed that EEfiles.com would get an interface and be a stand-alone site.
Unfortunately, due to some unexpected issues, the release of EEfiles.com was delayed until the middle of February.


To be continued...