Anyway, Axecollector. com was originally meant to be a social networking site for guitarists. My friend Bill Fate and I came up with the idea, and knocked it around for a few months back in 2005 or so. The first version of the site was originally just going to focus on Fenders, and was called:
At some point, we decided to expand the site to include all types of guitars. We even had a homepage mock-up, which looked this this:
In any case, we just decided at some point not to go ahead with this project. For all I know, it still might be a decent idea, but neither one of us had the time or motivation to run a full-time website on top of our full-time jobs.
Nevertheless, I still owned the domain name, and just decided to run a scaled-down version of the site myself, which would again just concern itself with vintage Fenders. The site went live in April, 2006.
Since I graduated from the school of D.I.Y. web design (class of 2001), the site was never all that functional, attractive, or even easy to maintain for that matter. Any time a guitar was submitted to the site, a whole new page had to be set up by hand. This included formatting all the pictures to the correct size, and adding the guitar listing to the inventory page etc., which took up quite a bit of my time.
I still think our original idea may be viable, so who knows if it will be revived at some future date. But for now, running a Fender registry is just not something I want to continue, especially since the site is always running at a deficit, even will the millions of ads I run.
So thanks for the memories. I always wondered why there wasn't a registry for vintage Fender electrics, and am glad I decided to start one up myself and keep it running for a couple years. Now I guess it is somebody else's turn.
