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Celebrating 10 years of UKClimbing

by Nick Smith 29th June 2009

Example page from UKC Today marks 10 years for Climbers.net doing all technical development on the most popular climbing website in the world, UKClimbing.com.

Any large website is naturally a team effort, and UKC in 2009 is a far more professional affair, with top quality news, reviews & articles, well supported by the climbing industry, and most importantly, a thriving horde of regular users who contribute to the forums, photo galleries, logbooks, ...

While UKC was already popular back in 1999, the site is almost unrecognisable 10 years later. When I joined the team, UKC was a small, essentially static, site, with all the content in hand-written HTML with a few CGI scripts written in Perl. It had 20,000 page views in June 1999. One of my first jobs was to introduce a 'gear' message board, using PHP v2 scripting and a MySQL database, soon followed by a simple database of all the indoor climbing walls in the UK.

10 years on, and UKC still makes extensive use of PHP (now up to v5) and MySQL databases. It has 6.7 million page views (excluding images) and over 170,000 visitors each month. Far more than just a popular discussion forum, every part of the site has real depth of content.

It's tricky to summarise 10 years of hard work - there have been so many aspects of the site that have been great to work on: from clever little bits of design that help improve usability, to major ground breaking new features like the Logbooks system, and from building a framework to help the editorial team produce their top quality content, to custom-written advertising systems that help pay the bills.

Through all its major changes, I think UKC has managed to stay true to its roots (ahem) as a site for the climbing community, and its success and loyalty of users is testament to that.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years will bring

Read more: UKClimbing.com discussion
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