The beginning: Sept 2009
During my last year of university I decided to create Fishery Network for my final major project.
I first created Fishery Network for a project I did at University with the idea to carry on developing it in the future. I received excellent feedback regarding its functionality, design and potential future development. I also received a First Class Honours Degree in Web Design, which made all the hard work I had to put into Fishery Network more worthwhile.
Unfortunately since leaving university I have been extremely busy and this is why it’s not until now I am able to carry on developing Fishery Network. Over the last few months I have reproduced Fishery Network, building in all the new skills I have learnt over the last year whilst working as a web developer.
I am now happy to release a new version which is very user friendly and I have plans to roll out new features as the website becomes more popular. If you have any suggestions please feel free to get in touch as I would love to hear from you.
Jack Sowden
This is how the first Fishery Network home page looked.
This is how the first Fishery Network fishery profiles looked. They had a few more features which we may add back in depending on how people use the new site.
This video shows the original Fishery Network, back in 2010. The video takes you through a full fishery profile. We have dramatically changed these now but doesn't half show how we have progressed the website.
This short video gives you a tour of some of the original location based features. This video is from 2010 and at this time there was no other website using this technology in this way.
How we have evolved!
During my last year of university I decided to create Fishery Network for my final major project.
Realising the popularity of fishing amongst Facebook members we created a profile for Fishery Network. Also around this time a holding page was launched under the domain name www.fisherynetwork.co.uk, which gave detailed information about the forthcoming website.
A website called ShareCatch was developed to help gain knowledge and experiment with different coding techniques. This also helped make important decisions about the project and was a great learning curve. It gave me a much better understanding in how users would adapt to a website asking them to share information about their fishing. ShareCatch will become a part of the redeveloped Fishery Network once it is up and running.
After a lot of hard work and planning, Fishery Network was ready, yeehaa!. At this point over 5000 people had liked our Facebook page and there was a great interest from people wanting to help market the project after seeing it at the degree show. This left me feeling very fulfilled.
After a very tense month of waiting the letter came through the door delivering that all important result that Fishery Network had helped me achieve a First Class Honours degree! Whoop!
After the easy life of university nothing really progressed with Fishery Network until the following year, February 2012. During which time a half hearted effort tried to update Fishery Network with the new technical skills which I had developed. Sadly this new edition did not really achieve what was expected and due to other commitments Fishery Network died and almost became forgotten!
Since leaving university I had to learn a lot and had many experiences with web based projects which could be related to some of the ideas I had for Fishery Network. So for this reason I got it back inside me to bring Fishery Network back to life and spent every available spare moment I had coding the NEW Fishery Network site.
Early May 2013 the new version of Fishery Network is more or less ready to be released. We are going to trial it live for a month in order to gather and evaluate any feedback.