Sinch.net has been the online home of my band Sinch since it’s original incarnation way back in the internet dark ages of 1997. It was also how I learned HTML and eventually CSS and Javascript. And then PHP. And WordPress. And 50 other things I learned because I wanted the site to do something it wasn’t doing.

It’s also where I learned how to cultivate a community, through the message boards, our email newsletter and eventually the blog, although it wasn’t called that to begin with (blogs hadn’t been “invented” yet). Through the interactions with our fans, before Myspace and Facebook, and really, before most bands had anything on their site other than maybe a few photos, some tour dates and links to RealPlayer files that took 5 minutes to buffer, I learned that the key to building a loyal fanbase was to form a genuine and authentic connection. And free downloads.

The screenshots here show the latest version of the site that was launched back in 2008. About a year later, soon after we started the Fan Funded Album project, our WordPress installation was hacked so I took the opportunity to build a custom site for the new project, take the hacked site down and redirect all our traffic to the new site. The main site is still down but a new version will be going up to coincide with the release of the new album (whenever that is).

Although you can’t view the live site, you can take a tour of a bunch of the different versions that have existed throughout the years on the Archive.org WayBack Machine. Unfortunately it only goes back to the year 2000 because that’s when we finally got our own domain name.