FJ was started on 22nd December 2005, ready for the 2006 F1 season. It was basically all Simons idea - him being a big Montoya fan. Alas, with little to no knowledge of how websites work he was a bit stuck.. fortunatley for him, his mate Matt knew a little and had some contacts for some nice cheap hosting. After a short while and several beers the site was online.

The site has been through a number of styles and setups since. Initially the site was "designed" by Simon, but it wasn't exactley beautiful, and there wasn't much content. Simon decided he wanted a forum, Matski really didn't as he knew that it ment hundreds of hours of hard graft staring at meaningless PHP which he REALLY had no clue about. Fortunatley Simons vision prevailed and the forum, although really basic looking and not that big, was created.

As the forum grew slowly the rest of the site became less interesting, so a re-vamp was required. Forum member Belz.dan gave it a complete style overhaul and it looked much better, and also had a spanish speaking half. To be honest though, we weren't updating the site very often at all, and looking at the site stats basically all the traffic was going straight to the forum anyway. When the NASCAR announcement came in 2006 the english half of the site was revamped again by Matski and the spanish half was dropped - but even the english half had become a little pointless so the forum was set as the site homepage.

Since then as Matski's skills with PHP and MySQL have increased the site has become a little more professional looking and hopefully provides good content.

We've now got some really good members and made some good friends, but without some decent sucess in NASCAR we're not sure if FJ can really get much bigger, but fingers crossed.

The forum is hosted by a friend of Matski's (Adam), it is built using open source code, phpBB for the most part, neither simon or matski new anything about forums before we started this one so it's been a steep learning curve. As it stands today there is probably about 100 hours work gone into it with about half an hours maintenance per week. The costs involded are pretty minimal, the site only costs Simon and Matt the same as 10 pints of beer, per year. This is mainly thanks to site host Adam.

Some simple stats: as of August 08 we've had over 5 million hits and currentley get about 500000 a month, but hits are pretty much meaningless. In practice we get 3-4000 visits per month, which is not too bad, but probably a little less than we got from the F1 days.

Anyway, thats probably wasted 5 minutes of your life, that'll teach for clicking little question marks.

Thanks for your support

Simon & Matt
FORMULAJUAN.NET