In exactly one month, NSNO will celebrate our tenth birthday, and over the next month we will be exploring the history of the site and how we covered some of the biggest stories about Everton, as well as how we developed as a website from our humble beginnings on a free hosting service.

Most people won’t remember the exact date, but at the same time as Wayne Rooney was hobbling off a pitch in Portugal with a broken metatarsal, I was embarking on a journey that I could never have planned.

It was June 24th 2004 and my interest in England’s progress in the European Championships had – if you’ll pardon the pun – wained with Rooney’s departure, and so I set about putting together an Everton website. I’d been involved in others, such as nil-satis.com (which has morphed into the excellent GrandOldTeam.com) and had posted on other forums, but I wanted to combine my passion for writing with dabbling in a bit of web design.

My passion for writing came about in the mid 1990’s when I worked as a freelance writer for several regional newspapers in the South West about dance music. I’d had pieces published in national magazines, and enjoyed the freedom to, basically, have my say about stuff that I cared about. Since moving back to Merseyside in 2001, that had stopped and there was something missing. Writing about Everton was about to fill that gap and expand into more and more of my life than I could have planned.

I set up on a free hosting service using a content management system called “e107” and quickly set it up and published a few bits of writing. Ian Mills sent over some videos that he’d made about Everton, and in the days before Youtube, NSNO quickly became the place to go to find videos of the Blues. The forums had 2 or 3 regular contributors and we were about to get our first ever “exclusive” story…

The news aggregator site NewsNow had picked up on NSNO and was sending traffic our way, and it quickly got to the point where our traffic was exceeding our free allowances. When the site was set up, I had said to my (now ex) partner that “if it starts to cost money, I’m stopping” but then I found myself waking up early one Sunday morning to transfer the site to a paid host. I expected an earful, but instead she suggested that I invested in a proper domain name as well. So, less than a month after NSNO had hit the web, we had our own top-level domain name: NSNO.co.uk was born.

A few days later, and a still-injured Wayne Rooney was heading to a tattoo parlour in Aintree. Word got around quickly and soon there was a crowd of people outside waiting to see what he had been inked with. He left with it covered, but one of that crowd sent their photo to me and NSNO were the first site to show Wayne as he left the shop. The next morning I spoke to the owner who, while she refused to tell us what the tattoo was, quelled rumours that he had got “Colleen” tattooed on his arm – at least for now. NewsNow sent buckets of traffic our way and we were on the map.

As a website, our early days seemed to revolve around Wayne Rooney. From starting on the same day as he broke his toe, to speaking to Bill Kenwright the day after Rooney signed for Manchester United.

In the summer of 2004, Twitter was just a twinkle in it’s creators eyes, and Facebook was still an idea being stolen from paying customers, and so forums were where people went to sound off and hide behind monikers so as not to be identified. Email was also still pretty popular too – remember those days? As I watched Rooney being paraded around the pitch at Old Trafford and telling the media that “One day Evertonians will know the real reasons I left” (we’re still waiting Wayne) I read on The People’s Forum that some of “the People” had been sending death threats to Bill Kenwright. Obviously, that’s not the way to go about things, and so I sent a message of my own and offered him the chance to address the fans through a different medium than the official channels.

I didn’t expect anything back, we were a website less than 3 months old and written by one bloke on a very dodgy computer and a dial-up connection. But I did hear back. I was asked to send over a series of questions that Bill would answer for me. An hour later, and he was on the phone telling me about his “pain and suffering” at being forced to sell Wayne Rooney to Manchester United. To be honest, I was expecting an email reply, and hadn’t prepared at all for him to call, so I wasn’t even ready to write down his responses, let alone record them…ahem!

Those early months set the course for the site. Over the ten years that followed I’ve been lucky enough to meet some fantastic Evertonians, interview our legends, and spend time in the company of my heroes, all while documenting a decade of the football team I love. Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing the experiences that NSNO has given not only to me, but also those who have contributed and visited the site.