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Thursday, January 18, 2018

The Last Webmaster: The story of the little website that could

Hello visitors. I’m the Sea-Monkey® Uncle and I want to thank Bill for the opportunity to write in this cool blog.

Sea-Monkeys® Web-Site circa 2006
Click the image above or go here to take a peek at the official
Sea-Monkey© website back in 2006 from the Internet Archive.
I was the last webmaster of the ‘Educational Insights’ days. For me it was the golden era for the official Sea-Monkey® website, because I was revamping the whole site with new dynamic content and graphics under the direction of George Atamian. Mr. Atamian was the president of Exploratoy, the current licensee of Sea-Monkeys® at that time. Together as true lovers of Sea-Monkeys®, we were trying to create an interactive site with the highest standard worthy to the brand name. I was hired precisely because of my passion and extensive work done with my personal Sea-Monkey® fan site*.


I seized the opportunity to develop a Sea-Monkey® distribution dealership for the Caribbean too.

Suddenly, there was this new deal with a company named Big Time Toys (BTT), and since then, I lost all communications with anything related to the Sea-Monkey® brand and consequently the website maintenance went downhill.

For some reason that I still don’t fully understand, I wasn’t hired to continue the work on the website. If you search on the internet for the site’s history right now, you’ll notice that it didn’t go that well after the switch, to the point that at the time of this writing (January 2018) the site doesn’t even look official.

I lost the chance to be both a dealer and webmaster. The website never saw the complete revamp I planned for it.

I will probably never know the exact details for everything that happened to that deal with BTT. The lesson for everyone here is:

If you have a website presence, no matter what is happening at backstage on your company, you need to not abandon your site maintenance. You also need to make sure that you have an experienced webmaster, you keep the site updated, and you have a knowledgeable person working on the social media. I see this mistake happen a lot (this is assuming that someone without experience and education on the field can handle such important tasks on a company website).

I wish someday, after all problems are ironed out with all dealership issues, that I will see a new Sea-Monkey© website worthy of the brand name again. Meanwhile, I’ll keep refreshing my browser and hoping for a change.



* Visit what's left of my personal 90's Sea-Monkeys® Page. Several links are broken. Also skip the Java prompt at the main page, I leave the site as-is for the historic value :)


3 comments:

  1. Wonderful! Thanks for posting your story, Sea-Monkey Uncle. I hope to hear from you again, soon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You will always be a Sea Monkey legend

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  3. What a brilliant design! Let's hope when Sea-Monkeys make their comeback they'll be honoured with a site as good as this!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to leave your thoughts on this adventure.

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