To celebrate the launch of our new website, our 2nd cornet and band secretary Chris Wiggins delves into the history of the band website. Chris’s detailed piece reveals how our online presence has moved with the times to keep Fulham Brass Band looking forward while upholding and celebrating its history.
“I’ve been in the band a pretty long time, and, as I have a job in software engineering that has absolutely nothing to do with designing or building websites, it’s fallen to me to look after the band’s website. When I joined the band in 2008, the band’s website looked a bit like this:
It’s only possible to show you this thanks to the Internet Archive’s amazing Way Back Machine, which captures snapshots of websites and stores them before they inevitably change and are lost forever.
It’s too long ago now for me to remember exactly how I was involved with this version of the website, but I took it over from Tom Butler, a player in the band who had just left to emigrate to Australia. At this time, we were a third section band and were using our previous logo, designed by Derek Treadwell, another ex-player. According to our news archive, this version of the website went live in July 2008. The Internet Archive does have a snapshot from before this date, but our website was either extremely primitive back then, or else (more likely) sadly the snapshot wasn’t properly captured and is text only:
This was captured in October 2007 and is the oldest snapshot of the website that exists.
Some time around 2013, I updated things with what I assume I thought at the time was a slick, modern design (perhaps it was for 2013?!):
We’d made it to the second section by this point, and had just been on a trip to Amboise in France to compete at the Concours de Brass Bands d’Amboise, where we won first prize! We competed in a section that had, well, just one other band!
In 2014, I went for a big redesign, and this version of the website has the honour of lasting for the next ten years!
At this point, we were still technically in the second section, but had just won our area contest and were due to be promoted to the first section from 2015.
Why did this version last so long? Well, we actually started thinking about a new website around 2019, planning some of the structure of the site to try to simplify it and target it at the three main groups we see visiting our website: people who want to hire us, people who want to join us, and people who want to come and see us. But, the pandemic happened, and various other interruptions meant that progress was very slow/non-existent.
But, 2023 rolled round and finally renewed impetus made us work hard to get the new website done. A friend of the band who’s a keen photographer came to take photos of us at a gig at Regent Hall. With those in hand we could finally launch the new website. I’ll include a screenshot of it here for people reading this in 2034 and wondering what the old website used to look like:
This version features our new logo, which we had designed for us in 2020 in time for our 125th anniversary by graphic designer and friend of the band, beckyismyname.
Hopefully this one will keep us going for a while. Check back in a few years to see the next one!”