Started my Atkins Site − 17 June, 2004
This can be a long story so I'll try to make it short.
In October 2003, I started Atkins and joined an Atkins diet support forum. This forum was great and filled with people that helped me, until the site went down for a week in late November. It went back up again, then crashed for 4 days the following week. Senior members on the site began doubting the site owners commitment to us. They created their own site and called it Atkins By the Book. They had asked me to help moderate it as well, I jumped at the chance.
Coincedently, the old site owner, let's call him Tom, got wind of the new site that was created and came back and began taking care of his site. A good thing for the people that stayed there. It's one of the reasons why I think we helped that site become what it is today. If we had stayed, thousands of people would have been lost.
Atkinsbythebook.com went great. Then after about 4 months, One owner, let's call him Don, decided that he wanted to be surpeme king and ousted two other admins that had initially gone into partnership with him. At about that time, Don became more concerned with money making ventures and was not into wasting time with a site that made him little or no profit. This worried me and several others. I offered to take the site from him and continue but he wanted to sell it. I figured why buy it when I could build a better one?
I started building www.atkinsalltheway.com. I wanted a site that was going to remain for a long time. I wasn't building the site to take Don's members away, I wasn't building the site to make money for myself. I was building a place for people to go when Don showed his true colors. I knew that it was only a matter of time, he had showed staff members many months prior. I wanted so badly to let everyone know what was going on, but it would have been in bad taste at the time. The only reason I say it now is that it has been a long time since it happened and so many bad feelings came out of it that the records need to be straightened.
After 2 weeks of building a pretty massive site with tons of information, I approached another staff member, Terry, about being a co-admin with me. She accepted and we began converting data that belonged to us and the community at large and placing it on our site so that there was information from the outset for anyone willing to follow Atkins the right way.
Terry, my girlfriend Chris, and my mom were the original staff and we worked hard to setup our values and beliefs. We took ideas that didn't work at previous sites and threw them out and created new ones. What was taboo to many sites (like linking to "competitors") was accepted at Atkins All The Way. We decided that we'd either sink or swim, but we'd always stay true to our members and not our own agendas. To this point, I have accepted donations, but I would in no way say that I have profited from the site. To do so would actually disappoint me. I could see myself becoming more concerned with adding ads to the site instead of adding great content. It's something I don't care to do. I have other sites for that purpose.
Now, on or about the date above, Don closed the site and placed a static page that said, "I can't do this anymore, sorry." At this point, only about 10 people knew about Atkins All The Way. One person was a moderator at Atkinsbythebook, but she had saved the email list of the site every few days waiting for Don to snap. We immediately sent out emails to the entire board to join Atkins All The Way and thus it began. That day, we got about 300 members.
AtkinsAlltheWay is still thriving. Do we have 33,000 users, half of which don't even come to the board anymore, no. But we have a solid membership that sticks around and helps people and it's something I'm very proud of. We've never wavered in our values for any one. Sure, people come and go, but people must realize that it's a diet support group and like diets, we may have people for only a few weeks, but them not returning has nothing to do with the quality of the site. Granted, we try hard to help them stay on track, but it's ultimately them that has to decide what the goal of Atkins is for themselves.
For anyone interested in trying Atkins or just checking out my site for a second, please check it out at http://www.atkinsalltheway.com.
In October 2003, I started Atkins and joined an Atkins diet support forum. This forum was great and filled with people that helped me, until the site went down for a week in late November. It went back up again, then crashed for 4 days the following week. Senior members on the site began doubting the site owners commitment to us. They created their own site and called it Atkins By the Book. They had asked me to help moderate it as well, I jumped at the chance.
Coincedently, the old site owner, let's call him Tom, got wind of the new site that was created and came back and began taking care of his site. A good thing for the people that stayed there. It's one of the reasons why I think we helped that site become what it is today. If we had stayed, thousands of people would have been lost.
Atkinsbythebook.com went great. Then after about 4 months, One owner, let's call him Don, decided that he wanted to be surpeme king and ousted two other admins that had initially gone into partnership with him. At about that time, Don became more concerned with money making ventures and was not into wasting time with a site that made him little or no profit. This worried me and several others. I offered to take the site from him and continue but he wanted to sell it. I figured why buy it when I could build a better one?
I started building www.atkinsalltheway.com. I wanted a site that was going to remain for a long time. I wasn't building the site to take Don's members away, I wasn't building the site to make money for myself. I was building a place for people to go when Don showed his true colors. I knew that it was only a matter of time, he had showed staff members many months prior. I wanted so badly to let everyone know what was going on, but it would have been in bad taste at the time. The only reason I say it now is that it has been a long time since it happened and so many bad feelings came out of it that the records need to be straightened.
After 2 weeks of building a pretty massive site with tons of information, I approached another staff member, Terry, about being a co-admin with me. She accepted and we began converting data that belonged to us and the community at large and placing it on our site so that there was information from the outset for anyone willing to follow Atkins the right way.
Terry, my girlfriend Chris, and my mom were the original staff and we worked hard to setup our values and beliefs. We took ideas that didn't work at previous sites and threw them out and created new ones. What was taboo to many sites (like linking to "competitors") was accepted at Atkins All The Way. We decided that we'd either sink or swim, but we'd always stay true to our members and not our own agendas. To this point, I have accepted donations, but I would in no way say that I have profited from the site. To do so would actually disappoint me. I could see myself becoming more concerned with adding ads to the site instead of adding great content. It's something I don't care to do. I have other sites for that purpose.
Now, on or about the date above, Don closed the site and placed a static page that said, "I can't do this anymore, sorry." At this point, only about 10 people knew about Atkins All The Way. One person was a moderator at Atkinsbythebook, but she had saved the email list of the site every few days waiting for Don to snap. We immediately sent out emails to the entire board to join Atkins All The Way and thus it began. That day, we got about 300 members.
AtkinsAlltheWay is still thriving. Do we have 33,000 users, half of which don't even come to the board anymore, no. But we have a solid membership that sticks around and helps people and it's something I'm very proud of. We've never wavered in our values for any one. Sure, people come and go, but people must realize that it's a diet support group and like diets, we may have people for only a few weeks, but them not returning has nothing to do with the quality of the site. Granted, we try hard to help them stay on track, but it's ultimately them that has to decide what the goal of Atkins is for themselves.
For anyone interested in trying Atkins or just checking out my site for a second, please check it out at http://www.atkinsalltheway.com.
