Happy Birthday PokeBeach!

Today is PokeBeach’s 5th birthday! Five years ago (2003) this website officially opened to the public with the address thepokebeach.cjb.net, though I had been working on it since 1999 in private. It sure has come a long way… I still don’t think it’s anywhere close to where I want it to be in terms of content, though. Both this site and I have also been through many hard times… my nana’s death, a deletion, three laptops, high school, lots of e-drama, seven different hosts, a major car crash, the first year of college, another deletion, etc., but we still are going strong! Hopefully one day, we’ll get to where I want us to be – I still haven’t pulled out the big guns yet.

But of course, the success of PokeBeach these past few years isn’t all just because of me. It’s attributable to many people, like… Shakespeare; Bangiras; Vincent; my mom, dad, nana, aunt, and brothers (behind the scenes); secret prerelease scan sources #1, 2, and 49 (to the anger of PUI); our forum mods like DocRobot, Porygon, PMJ; and many other people over the years! We still have a lot of work and growth to do, but we’ll get there eventually!

And just for historic purposes, here is the first post I ever made to the public. A lot of it still holds true! Speaking of this post, I need to get our news archives back up. XD

Welcome to PokéBeach, PokéMasters! I am Water Pokémon Master (WPM) and am the webmaster of this site. Today, the 15th of July, is what will be the Grand Opening of PokéBeach. I hope this site will be a very successful one with many visitors. Just so you all know, I will never abandon this site like many Pokémon webmasters have done in the past, and have major plans for it in the future.

Okay, now for the tour. To the left, you will notice a long table with names of stuff in it. This is what I like to call the left menu. Here you can find most of the content that’s on the site. I think that the biggest feature of this site would be the card scans. So far, I have scanned every card from every set (except Base, Jungle, and Fossil) and they are in good quality and are pretty big in size. Now, you may be wondering, what’s with the animated Pokémon at the bottom of the left menu. That’s just there to fill up some space, since the layout would look pretty uneven without it. Hopefully in the future, that space will all be filled up. To the right, you will see the right menu. This contains important dates, the TV episode schedule, and a (no brainer) quiz.

Alright, as you may probably think that PokéBeach is only a TCG website, you are wrong. For the news page (this one), it will contain news from everything that has to do with Pokémon, not just the TCG. Pages that don’t have anything to do with the TCG may be added in the future. Okay, tour done, have told you everything, visit daily for daily updates, make sure to send me your decks or I’ll be bored, if you’ve got any questions or want to know my e-mail, visit the comments or questions page in the long table at the left. WPM splashing out.

And hopefully we’ll last another half of a decade! If you have a favorite PokeBeach memory or remember something from the past you want to share about this site (or you just want to show off how long you have come here), feel free to post in this story’s news thread.