Welcome to Hawk Headquarters 2003   Written by: Mark O'Connor 1 January 2003   Welcome to season 2003 on Hawk Headquarters. As you can see, the site has undergone a complete overhaul since the end of 2002. We aim to bring you a more comprehensive, professional and attractive website in 2003, to consolidate our position as the premier online resource for all matters concerning the Hawthorn Football Club. Hawk Headquarters was born back in the summer months of 1999, when I became frustrated with the lack of presence for the club on the internet, and decided to do something about it. The site has undergone numerous changes since its inception. We have continually sought to introduce more and more comprehensive features to the site, including the message board, the player profiles and the incorporation of the views of contributors other than myself. Quite obviously, this year's version of the site is the most profound change the site has gone through. It will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that has suffered my rather Spartan web design skills over the last four years that the visual display and the extensive data banks that exist behind the scenes are not my work. The development of the site over the last six months has been largely due to three individuals, and it is to them that we owe the debt for the site we have today. In the middle of last season, I was contacted by a contributor to the message board who offered his services to redesign the website from the bottom up, incorporating several comprehensive databases on which the site's content would be built. Shaune Jenkinson, or 'Brystar' as he would be known to most of you through the message board, has been the single greatest driving force in taking the site from the unwieldy, bright yellow monstrosity of 2002 to the excellently designed and presented product you are now reading. Shaune's work over the last six months has been absolutely superb, and it's largely down to his expertise and passion for the project that we have been able to get the site to the position it is today. Thanks heaps Shaune. Dominic Milesi - 'GOALden Hawk' - will not mind me describing him as a football nerd. His passion for statistics, trivia and the general minutiae of the football club is phenomenal. It was Dom's Excel spreadsheet (that some of you were given a copy of) that formed the original basis of the database we have today. He used the resources of the excellent AFL Tables website (http://stats.rleague.com/afl/afl_index.html), refined and researched the data on games, players and records, and presented Shaune with a fantastic resource on which to begin rebuilding the site. As with Shaune, there's no way we would be where we are without Dom's tireless work. Thanks. No longer will you have to suffer severe eyesore from my gaudy gold backgrounds. The visual design of the site has been taken over by Ryan Mason - 'Mace007' - and I think you'll agree that he has done a terrific job in presenting the site in true Hawthorn fashion. Cheers Ryan. It has been my long-standing goal for Hawk Headquarters to stop being 'Mark's website', and to take on its own identity. With the efforts of Shaune, Dom and Ryan, as well as the continuing contributions and support from Brett Collett, Chris Toce, Adam Collins and everyone who contributes on our message board, I think we've arrived at that goal. My thanks to everyone for helping us get here. There's still a fair bit of work to go on behind the scenes, and we're fine-tuning several portions of the site before it becomes fully operational. Specifically, you will see menu options for Hawthorn chat and for Box Hill - neither of these features are yet available. But please poke around wherever you see fit, and if anything comes to your attention that is factually incorrect, spelt wrong, missing information or simply doesn't work, please let us know and we'll get onto it as soon as possible. Like the team, Hawk Headquarters fell away at the end of 2002, but I'm confident that the team and the website are set for very big things in 2003. Welcome aboard. Mark O'Connor

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