This all started back in 1999, sometime around the release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Nik was doing a tour of duty for the Army in Alaska and was heavy into online gaming. It was here she got the Web Design bug. But back then most of it revolved around a Site Builder, cut and past images and text was all that was required. “God, looking back I remember thinking that I was doing something really awesome! But in actuality they were horrible.” she says. Sometime that winter her nephew asked for a set of the Harry Potter books, which she of course got for him. However, due to a six month deployment she was unable to get the present to him. “They just sat on the shelf collecting dust, even after I got back. I was a huge Potter hater.” She laughs, “I don’t even know why. I guess it was because it’s what everyone was into and I refused to go with the flow.” But with winters in Alaska being cold and Nik being from Georgia she didn’t go out too often and read a lot. Soon her book collection diminished, and she did pick up the Harry Potter books she meant to send her nephew. “I became a fiend… I put just about everything off, we’d have parties in the barracks or take trips into town and I just blew everyone off because I couldn’t put the books down. I think I read the first two in the course of a weekend, then rolled on to the third and every chance I got I was reading, even during bathroom breaks.”
It didn’t take long before Nik found hundreds, if not thousands of websites dedicated to the boy wizard, and having a little experience in the area decided to come up with her own, Aurors Headquarters.net. “I honestly had no clue as to what I was doing. I would just copy other sites, and change a few things here or there. Ugh… it was awful, I was even scared to use my name on the site.”
Later in 2002 she moved out to Colorado serving another tour of duty in the Army. But this time she had her cousin, Jason McTyres nearby to lend a helping hand. Jason worked for a local newspaper doing advertising. “I hated my job, it was so boring, but with a wife, house payment, and kid on the way, I did what I had to do.” Jason says that he never was a Harry Potter fan, far from it. “I was more into the MMOG’s than anything. It was my stress reliever. Then comes along Nik blabbing about Harry Potter. I got irritated with all the potter chatter but she can be pretty convincing when she wants to be. She pretty much forced me at gun point to read the first book. But I’m glad she did. I loved it and went on to reading the second, third and fourth.” Eventually, Jason helped Nik work for Aurorhq.net, but the site never took off.
The site was extremely unsuccessful but didn’t go under until late 2002. It wasn’t because of the lack of visitors that it closed down, it was because Nik had a better idea. ” I watched as sites like Mugglenet, The Dark Lord.net, Harry Potter Fanzone and The Leaky Cauldron flourish and desperately wanted that for my site. I knew that wasn’t going to happen with Aurorhq.net, and wanted to start from scratch. Build a site I was willing to put my name on, and have a sense of originality, something that other sites didn’t offer, and what the big guys didn’t offer. No easy feat, but I was hell bent on doing it.” It wasn’t only the unsuccessfulness of the site that made Nik get rid of it, she had another deployment to go to, this time she wasn’t sure she would make it back, she was being shipped off to Iraq. “This was a bit scary for me, but the whole time Jason and I kept planning and plotting what we were gonna do. I remember calling my mom in Kquait telling her to send me Order of the Phoenix as soon as it came out. I got a letter with the book about six months after it was released. She told me that she went to a midnight release party at Barnes and Noble and sent it out to me the next day. Mail was really slow there, and we never knew where we were going sleep the next day. But I remember imaging my Mom at a Harry Potter release party, and laughed histariclly. Then I devoured the book. When I got to the death scene, I slammed it down in the sand and walked away fuming, then sprinted back to it and continued reading it. It was one of the things that really made the deployment a lot easier. And fueled my drive to create a super site when I got back.”
Nik did return in winter 2003, but running a website was the last thing on her mind. It wasn’t until late 2004 that she and Jason got back to planning things out. “It started as a joke in a conversation,” Jason tells us, “then it became an obsession. We were deciding on names when JK Rowling released a list of the first couple of chapters for Book 6, The Half-Blood Prince, and we found it, Spinner’s End.com. Our other choice was going to be Potter’s Darkness.com, but I’m glad we decided on this one.” And so Spinner’s End began to unfold. The two got a hosted domain on Geocities, a premade layout and started researching the series. “Nik was so hell bent on originality and doing our own research that I though we were going to kill ourselves trying to do it all our own. I remember begging her to just go to HP Lexicon or something, and I got an earful every time. But it turned out to be a good idea.” The site gained quick popularity, and eventually hired on more staff to help out. The team even got an offer from another webmaster they couldn’t refuse.
In 2005 Spinner’s End.com was contacted by Danielle over at Room of Requirement (no longer active) who also ran a Hosting Company. She was looking for clients and offered to give the gang free hosting, domain name the works, just for a little advertising and word of mouth. “We were so greatful to her for that. And she was always on point when we needed help. If it wasn’t for her we would have never gotten the site to it’s full level.
Another turning point in the site’s history was when Nathan was hired on to help with the forums and advertise the site. Though the site was popular, Nik, and Jason were in there mid twenties, most fans were still in their early teens or younger, they just couldn’t reach that young of an audience. “When Nathan came about the site exploded. He was our go to guy. He advertised his ass off and drew people in while Me, Nik, Dalton, Mark, Kristen, Aurora, and the others would keep them there.” At one point the site even got an honorable mention by one of the top Harry Potter sites/podcast out there, MuggleCast which threw the site for a huge loop. “We never thought anyone was really paying attention to us, and acted so. We added silly stuff like The Junk Files and Spinner’s Guide To The End, and it got rave reviews. We were so psyched when we heard our site being on Andrews Huh? Comment of the Week on MuggleCast.”
While the site was at it’s peak popularity hackers prowled the site, as well as bandwidth problems. Nik tells us how Spinner’s End went under, “Things went great for a time, then the site just disappeared one day. No one knows what happened, we just tried to log in to the Control Panel and poof! It was gone. All our information, all our hard work, just gone!” In early 2007 the site went offline. But that didn’t stop Nik and Jason. Both were still determined to keep working in web design and be apart of the Potter Fandom on the net. “Fortunatley, we had a back up plan. A few months earlier we had came up with a network site idea that would become a full featured site.”
Muggles Behaving Badly Online was a small part of Spinner’s End.com, but was well established. It didn’t take long for the site to take off. Nik and Jason though disheartened remained determined. They enlisted the help of Jeremy, Jason’s twin brother to take the reigns as Webmaster. He was working in Canada, and had helped with some of the harder aspects of Spinner’s End. “I was never a Harry Potter fan. I didn’t even read the books until after the fourth film came out. I helped out here and there, but never was a part of the site like I am here.” Jeremy works in film Editing and travels a lot, but he loves coding, and doing graphics. It was because of him that Bad Muggles became a solid website. “I liked the idea because it was for everyone. You didn’t have to be a Harry Potter fan to enjoy the website. That and it didn’t just display news and information like every other Harry Potter fansite. This one was truly original.”
Over the past year MBBO.net has undergone numerous changes, and the trio just can’t seem to figure out what direction to take the site in. But now after a full year on the net they finally have a general idea. Jason says, ” We tried to do the spoofs, news and information, but we got overwhelmed. I think we were trying to recreate another Spinner’s End, and our hearts just weren’t in it. With the site doing things the way we are we are less stressed to push things out. There are times we get writers block and can’t think of anything to put up. When that happens it’s simple to update because there’s so much to the site.” Nik tells us, ” I like where the site is now and where it’s headed. It leaves things so much more open to everyone. We do want to move out of the Potter Zone, but for now we’re happy with the way things are. Our biggest achievement has been how far we’ve come in doing graphics. As you can see it’s become one our primary focuses. It use to be one of our weakest areas, now it’s one of our best.
Muggles Behaving Badly has come along way since it’s start and so have the staff. The group plan to do tons more in the coming year, and are growing larger by the day. The site will be celebrating its second birthday as a full featured site on November 15, 2008!
Interviewed and Written By Paul
Good Friend and Aspiring Journalist
