The biggest reason that I started this page was probably because I was very bored. Sometime around early August, I had gone and seen "The Princess Diaries" with a couple friends. It was then that I saw the first Harry Potter movie preview. However, I had already known that an HP movie was coming out. In April, my brother wanted me to look up some stuff on the internet about J.K Rowling for an essay at school. Somehow I managed to find an article about the kids (Daniel, Rupert and Emma) who had finally been casted in a new HP movie. I clearly remember taking one look at the picture (below) and stating, "They don't look anything like the characters. That movie is going to suck!" This proves that everyone eats their words sometimes, but I really took a big helping. Anyway, when I first saw the preview, I quickly told myself that I HAD to see that movie. The problem was that it was August and the movie wouldn't come out until November. What could I do until then?
The Internet! Over the next month, I found many sites devoted to the movie. I enjoyed looking at the pictures and reading previews on how the movie could turn out. November couldn't come fast enough.
By the time October rolled around, I thought that November seemed even farther off than in August. I was quickly getting bored of the sites I had found and started to build my own in my NOTEPAD tool on my computer, using straight HTML and pictures I saved off the internet. The page had no title, but it was based on Hermione, my favourite character from the books.
After a while, I got bored just looking at my site. I wanted people to see it! But how? I started to look for places that I could cut and paste my HTML off of NOTEPAD and onto the screen. I looked at Homestead, but HTML didn't seem to work there, so I got rid of that idea. It was then that I came across Angelfire. After about two days on the computer, I learned how to operate everything and started to transport my page. By then, however, I figured that, by looking at all the other HP sites, I wouldn't be able to compete. I needed a theme, something not many people had. There were plently of Hermione sites out there, so what could I use? It struck me when I was going to sleep that night that I could do a page about the girl who played Hermione. At that time, I couldn't remember her name, but I was determined to find out.
The next day, October 13th, I started to work right away. I looked through search directories for pictures, interviews, facts, anything about Emma. I started to re-arrange everything on my page and was happily looking at the finished project on October 16, 2001, 2:26am. I was surrounded by Coke cans and 4 disks of pictures, but I was done. Four different sections stared back at me from the screen and I went to bed.
What my site really needed was publicity. I started to go back to other sites to see where all the fans came from and that was when I came across the FF Top 100. I quickly signed up for that and within a couple of days I had my first few visitors. It took about a month, but then, suddenly I got visitors by the thousands. I still really don't know what happened - one day I gained two hundred new viewers and then *wham*, three thousand people came out of nowhere.
That's basically the creation of my site. It's pretty amazing what people can do when they are bored enough!
(Yawn! History can be so boring, right?)
By: Hermione Fan
Go Back to the Unofficial Emma Watson Page
