Inside JagsZone - History

JagsZone was established on the Internet in 1997 as Kevin's JagZone, however, the story of JagsZone starts in 1996. JagsZone started out in 1996 as a profile for an AOL screen name that was customized to consist of the Jaguars' record, last game score, next game, and more Jaguars information. After the 1996 season it was decided that Kevin's JagZone would not work as just a profile and would need to be brought to the internet. Without much web design experience, Kevin's JagZone started out as a simple site that had a large load time but got the information across to the few viewers who saw it through the 1997 season.

In the summer of 1998 Kevin's JagZone began a redesign and was re-launched on January 6, 1999. The new design was much more appealing than the former design, however, with the site growing as fast as it was, the design was virtually impossible to keep consistent throughout all the pages.

Articles began being written and posted in the summer of 1999. Soon the article archive grew to over 100 articles. Kevin's JagZone continued to grow and it was decided that a new design was needed to support the growth of Kevin's JagZone. With that, another new design was re-launched on November 20, 1999. That site design was used throughout the remainder of the 1999 season, and the majority of the 2000 season. Some changes were made to change the look including the graphics on the top of each page.

Nearing the end of the 1999 season, JagZone began complete NFL playoff coverage, using associated press articles and columnists' writings; JagZone became the number one site for playoff information on a fan site. Soon after the end of the 1999 season, with more experience in web design, each page was implemented with Server Side Includes to allow much easier and quicker changing of every page on the site allowing consistency over the entire site.

In September of the 2000 season, Kevin's JagZone was again redesigned. The new page was re-launched as JagZone on October 1, 2000. The new design was launched on the domain www.jagzone.org and continued through the 2002 season.

At the start of the 2002 season, JagZone began implementing PHP and MySQL coding to the site. All archived articles were added to a database and article updates were live instantaneously.

Moving forward to the end of the 2002 season, JagZone lost the jagzone.org domain name to a search company. The new domain jagszone.com was bought and a new design and restructuring was commenced to clean up JagZone. In addition, JagZone was renamed to JagsZone and took on the slogan "Jagadelic Since 1997." This design was changed only slightly for version seven in the middle of the 2003 season.

At the end of the 2003 season due to complaints about the darkness of JagsZone and due to the offseason the current design, version 8.0, was launched on March 15, 2004.

Nearing the end of training camp I decided to bring JagsZone in a new direction. With my new job working in web development I had learned the power of CSS or Cascading Style Sheets coding. With this power I've been able to cut JagsZone's HTML code by nearly half. The result is a faster loading page for you.

In January of 2002 JagsZone joined the Fan 2 Fan Alliance (F2FA) of fan-based football sites. F2FA features the best of the best in independent fan sites. These webmasters have struggled by themselves and their small staff to get to where they are without the help of big companies.

Since the inception of JagsZone in 1996 we have grown immensely in our eight year history. We hope that you tell your friends and neighbors and keep the spirit of JagsZone alive. We will be here as long as the fans keep coming and will strive our best to give the fans what they want. If you would like to see a feature added, please do not hesitate to contact us on the contact page. We look forward to growing with you more in the future and thank you for coming to JagsZone for your Jacksonville Jaguars Fan Site needs.

Sincerely,
Kevin Basarab
Webmaster/Founder - JagsZone