IKEAFANS History and Timeline

February 2005 - Began a collection of threads on IKEA Kitchens from a kitchens forum on another website for the purposes of archiving the information - many, many generous people participated in gathering the threads and making them available to others.

March 2005 - Created a webpage (IKEA Kitchens Fansite) to host the .zip files on free webspace provided by ISP, and added some links to resources. Began cataloguing information on IKEA products and fielding questions.

April 2005 - Continued adding information and photos of Finished Kitchens and IKEA Kitchen Before and After projects. Added some IKEA Kitchen FAQs and IKEA Kitchen Product Tutorials.

May 2005 - Got indexed by Google, and began getting more members from search engines. Opened a Comments page in Guest Book format to track questions and answers.

June 2005 - February 2006 - Bought ikeafans.com domain, and with donated graphics, content and legal advice, the IKEA Fansite and Forums was born on June 18, 2005. Watched membership double every quarter for over a year, and forums became active and self-sustaining.

March 2006 - October 2006 - Outgrowing our site structure and forum software, we began looking at ways to expand and enrich the site without diluting or changing the heart of the IKEA Fansite - the forums. A new color scheme was developed and a new logo and graphics were commissioned. Work began on the new IKEApedia, galleries, directories and continued in earnest.

November 2006 - Following a number of outages with our host and after experiencing instability in the software, gears shifted from website development to forum migration and the move to the new forum structure was completed November 15, 2006. The IKEA Fansite and Forums was reborn as simply IKEAFANS.

December 2006 - Development, integration and population of the new site continued. The first IKEAFANS T-shirts and Fanclub cards are shipped to Moderators. All catalogs that are shipped go out with Fanclub cards, and a request to spread the word. Viral marketing takes hold.

January 2007 - Work continues behind the scenes to refine new features and populate the IKEA Store Directory, the Glossary, IKEA Products, IKEA Instructions and the IKEA Brochures and Documents sections of the IKEApedia. Photos are uploaded and catalogued in the galleries. After pulling our first all-nighter since college, we rolled out the new home page, the IKEApedia, the galleries and other new features on January 11, 2007.

February 2007 - May 2007 - In March, IKEAFANS hosts its first Meet & Greet at IKEA Atlanta, GA. Membership continues to double quarterly, bringing membership totals to 11,000 by early May 2007. IKEAFANS attends the launch of the STOCKHOLM series in NYC in May.

July 2007 - The first every IKEAFANS ModCon is held in Seattle from July 22th-24th and is attended by over a dozen IKEAFANS staff and spouses over the course of the weekend. We met other IKEAFANS at at Meet & Greet at the Seattle IKEA and toured local IKEAFANS' IKEA kitchens.  It was a legendary weekend!

August 2007 - December 2007 - September brought a Meet & Greet complete with a behind the scenes tour at Conshohocken, PA.  Development begins on Workbooks to help members with the process of planning an IKEA project from start to finish. IKEAFANS membership continues to soar.

January 2008 - March 2008 - IKEAFANS launches campaigns to generate income or we will have to shut down.  Meanwhile, development is begun on a CMS to manage rapidly expanding content in a way that can generate income for the site. Membership exceeds 44,000 in March 2008.

January 2008 - August 2008 IKEAFANS launches IKEAFANS 4.0, integrating the best of content management systems, and the best of forum systems to bring the best of IKEA information to IKEAFANS worldwide. Membership exceeds 65,000 in August 2008.