About
Always wanted to learn all about Smiley Helper? (yeah, right) If you do, keep reading. :)
History
I will always credit Neopets with my original introduction to html and graphics over five years ago. A few years after that, way back in the year 2003 (or was it 2002?) I started a guild on Neopets. Of course, this wasn't much different than my normal routine. By then I had already had around four guilds (which was a lot for me, I swear!) and wanted to make yet another guild (incidentally, the first guild I ever made was called Smiley Hut).
I remember the original sketch I made for the guild's layout (something I still do for Smiley Helper's layouts.. most of the time). It was this cheesy Girl Scout person helping people on Neopets. I planned things for about a month- everything from the names for the ranks to the activities to the website and EVERYTHING. Well, once I start planning things, I don't like to wait to start them. My original plan was to start the guild on January 1st because, of course, that's just a snazzy way to ring in the new year. However, my enthusiasm got the best of me, and I settled on starting it December 1st. What does this have to do with the history of Smiley Helper? I'm almost there! ;) Anyway, this guild was called Secret Helper because my goal for the guild was to help people on Neopets, but not except a ton of fame or credit for it. In other words, have a guild of unsung heroes.
Between my real-life best friend and my council of online friends, we made a successful guild that got to 68 members, which was a respectable amount. It may not seem like a lot, but they were great members who would stay no matter what. This is where Smiley Helper comes in. There are many other histories I could talk about, but to make it short, I had gone through two websites already (one hosted on geocities called Smiley Fun and the other on Angelfire called On A Cloud) and I really wanted a domain. Well, Secret Helper was taken. :( I thought for weeks on a name that would work and still be related to the guild (I also wanted something that could be anything in case the guild ended up dying). With the help of my family, we came up with the name Smiley Helper because I loved happy faces at the time- and I still do!
I got the domain for my birthday. It was online June 7th, 2004, but since nothing was there, I don't consider Smiley Helper's birthday to be until June 11th, which is when I started working on it. I worked obsessively to make it Secret Helper's guild website as well as a neopets help site. It wasn't until a month or so later that I added some cheesy little graphics, and surprisingly, the tutorials didn't come about until MUCH later. After Secret Helper died, I dumped the guild pages of Smiley Helper and it just became a site for Neopets graphics and help. Although I tried to make other guilds on Neopets, none of them lasted longer than a month. It just wasn't the same.
However, I added a lot more stuff to Smiley Helper and got some great affiliates (the originals have all long been closed). Gradually it became less of a Neopets site and more of a graphics and tutorials site. I was so happy the day I got 100 visitors. It never got much beyond that until I FINALLY changed hosts almost two years later and it jumped overnight to 300 a day. Then it jumped to 500 visitors a day and during Christmas time it went up to 1,000 a day. After the holidays it went back to around 700 a day, and is usually growing (lately it's been 1,000 people a day, so I'm jazzed). :)
I know I could have talked about a lot more, but I'm afraid I've already written way too much for the normal attention span. ;D
