HEY GUYS WE ARE LIVE !!
Due to the delay in DNS redirection it may take up to 24 hours for you to see the new site, don't worry it will come.

www.manlyseaeagles.com.au

Thank you

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you that have made One Eyed Eagle a success. I would like to thank all the people who have contributed to the site over the years, and helped give One Eyed Eagle a different edge. I would like to thank everyone who has helped me from technical aspect especially when I was first starting out, not only did it enable me to build One Eyed Eagle, it also gave me a whole new career. To those who bought our gear and other merchandise and to our sponsors I sincerely thank you for your financial support of the website.

And most of all I would like to thank everyone who has turned up. Had it not been for the overwhelming support One Eyed Eagle would never have been the success that it was.

 

The new website plan

Stage 1
The first stage release of the new official Manly Warringah Sea Eagles Website will be up and running some time after the Raiders game and prior to the first semi final. This site will include all the functionality of the existing official website and much of the functionality of One Eyed Eagle.

IMPORTANT – Sign up on the new website once it goes live to ensure that you are kept a breast of everything going on at the club!

Stage 2
Over the off-season you will see some new functionality added to the Manly website in preparation for the new season.

Stage 3
Sometime in the new year (at a date to be decided) the Sea Eagles website will be re-released with some fanfare and a plethora of new functionality.

 

Why we’re shutting down

Back in 1997 I first entertained the idea of approaching the Sea Eagles to do a website. I spoke to a graphic designer friend of mine who was at the time developing websites commercially. He suggested that it would be worth developing a proof of concept website because at that stage the web was still in its infancy and the corporate world was only starting to appreciate what a great marketing tool it was.

With the help of my designer friend and a programmer friend I went about learning web design and developed a website for the company I was working for. In March 1998 I started on the proof of concept. On the 23rd of March 1998 the website went live as the “Another Unofficial Manly Warringah Sea Eagles Website”. The site had only been live for a week or two before I received an email from a development company who had already secured the official contract asking for feedback.

I have been involved in numerous tenders for the job so as you can imagine I am particularly excited about finally getting the go ahead. Obtaining the official contract was certainly the original focus of the website and I have always kept focus on that goal.

In some ways I don’t see One Eyed Eagle as shutting down, but instead finally reaching the potential I always believed it had.

Most, if not all of the One Eyed Eagle features will be found on the official Manly website plus we now have scope to add tonnes of additional functionality. Certainly there will be no place for One Eyed Eagle after the new Sea Eagles website goes live and in fact One Eyed Eagle would be nothing more than an inferior cousin.

The vibe from the club is very positive and the ideas being tossed around by the staff are sensational, it’s been a very exciting introduction.

 

One Eyed Eagle History

1998 - Another Unofficial Manly Warringah Sea Eagles Website
The website was first released on the 23rd March 1998. I chose the title of “the Another Unofficial Manly Warringah Sea Eagles Website” because during development there was only one Manly website, Bryan’s, but within the space of a few weeks a number of unofficial websites had popped up prior to mine going live. My bizarre sense of humor thought that having the title “Another Unofficial … “ was kind of amusing and therefore it stuck.

A few months in there were rumors that Spud (Mark Carroll) was unhappy in the UK and was going to return to Australia. With Manly not going that great I decided to add a feature to the site, the “Bring back Spud Message Board”. When we found out that Spud wouldn’t be coming back to Manly, I just turned the Message Board into a general Manly Message Board.

As far as I’m aware I was the first Rugby League Website to ever have a Message Board / Forum. That’s a pretty big wrap considering that now they are one of the biggest parts of your average Official or Unofficial NRL website.

We added a bunch of new functionality that year and that included coming up with M.E.G. (Manly Email Group). We were fairly early adopters of this technology and I still have the original mail list, 6 of these people have been identified as still a part of OEE in 2005.

We Created a Tipping Competition, which was manually calculated each week using an Excel spread sheet and the first winner was Menzies Maniac who won it over Tootsie (29 competitors).

1999 - Wow we've got a following
I was amazed at how much Manly fans were craving this website, and the Message Board was becoming very popular. We continued adding new features such as the “Pick the Table” competition. Looking at the Results there are heaps of people still with us in 2005 from these lists

Pick the Table Winner: Oliver’s Maybee
Pick the Table Runners Up (equal): Delron, John Mac and Myself
(39 competitors)

Tipping Comp Winner: Krusty
Tipping Comp Runner up: De Winner
(53 competitors)

2000 – Another Unofficial Northern Eagles Website
Manly and Norths had come together in what was going to be a great union. In the end it didn’t work out but we were pretty keen for it to succeed.

This was the first time we had a flash intro and it featured the combining of the two club logos to form the Northern Eagles Logo

New features such as the Website Poll, Chat room, Screen Saver, Cheerleaders, Club Histories, Team Lineup, Player Appearances and Points, Team pics, a funky News applet and Supporters Club were added. The Supporters club even featured our mate and Manly Eagle Rocker Groggo!

All the football stats were being manually entered into an Access Database then exported to Excel before being exported to HTML pages. From there we cut out the bits we wanted and put them on the site. Very manual, but far quicker than typing it by hand.

Pick the Table Winner: Tooves
Pick the Table Runner Up: Me
(64 competitors)

Tipping Comp Winners (Equal): Grail
Tipping Comp Runner up: NY Eagle
(99 competitors)

2001 – One Eyed Eagle – A new website for the fans
The website is re-launched as One Eyed Eagle with our own domain and a completely new logo, design and focus. (I decided on the name from a short list of available domains, on the way up to Nelson Bay, in fact I remember deciding on the name whilst driving around Corlette).

For the first time the site becomes completely dynamic, running off a number of Live Databases using ASP and therefore features far more news and information.

We build our own Message Board as the 3rd party provider has gone bust, and in fact the entire website is now built using my own software rather than using 3rd party stuff.

The tipping competitions become dynamic, no more spending hours each Monday night calculating the scores!

We have a great year receiving over 500,000 page views.

2002 – One Eyed Eagle – I’m Back Baby
The 2002 website is launched with our most liked intro ever. We launch the site with a new colour scheme, back to Maroon and White.

The Message Board had been seriously struggling at the end of the 2001 season so we got seriously techo and rebuilt the Message Board to run extremely fast. We added Dual View, so you could use it in Forum or Message Board format. We were also being hammered by disgruntled North Supporters so we added the Ignore Filter, so you could just block out messages from those posters who you wanted to ignore.

We start up TeamOEE and a few people start writing articles for us. Our Newsletters become available in full colour HTML Format.

One Eyed Eagle gets a heap of media exposure in various newspapers and Rugby League magazines and they talk up our Intro, Player of the Year voting (Steve Menzies Wins) and our Jumper Design Competition.

The Eagle Volley’s form, One Eyed Eagle supports the efforts of Mary Delves and the Eagle Volleys to get Manly back. They get plenty of exposure and start the wave of public support that eventually results in the Manly club leaving the central coast and returning to its spiritual home of Brookvale Oval.

2002 is much bigger than before and we get over 733,000 page views, up by 44%

2003 – OEE Manly is back
The Northern Eagles are officially put to bed and the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles are back at Brookvale. The new intro celebrates our return.

We come up with a new One Eyed Eagle logo that is used right up to the end. The new site comes in a choice of Home and Away colour schemes. Viewers can now use the site in its standard white background or in Maroon with white columns.

Team OEE writer Haig Kayserian comes on board and starts delivering exclusive content to OEE and we are interviewed for a new season spread in the Manly Daily.

One Eyed Wear - We get our own range of T-Shirts and they sell out in no time, in fact in the first year we do more than 3 reprints to cover demands.

Towards the end of the Season we increase our merchandise to include OEE Mouse Mats and Stubby Holders. We start selling the Grand Final Videos with great success and we also sell a bazillion copies of the long awaited NRL Video Game.

Our growth slowed in 2003 and our visits significantly dropped when we decided to take a tough stance on people wanting to argue about the Northern Eagles, Souths and Norths. Even so, we saw some growth of about 6%, with over 780,000

2004 – OEE Explodes
January 2004 goes nuts, bigger than ever before, once again our Sevens Tournament coverage is a great hit and we have one of our biggest months ever in the off season.

February is big and March goes ballistic with over 117,000 page views in the one-month. In July we hit our biggest month ever with over 174,000 page views. Overall we exceed 1.2 Million page views for 2004, a whopping 58% up on 2003.

Our intro focuses on the various Manly saviours using a Lord of the Rings vs Star Wars theme. We add a heap of new interactive features such as Manly Trivia, Man of the Match voting, My Team and My Team 90’s and these add to the success of OEE in 2004.

The 1970’s Grand Final DVDs become available and we sell a heap of these along with all the OEE merchandise through the shop.

2005 – OEE Bigger than Big
I started 2005 with the view that we would really struggle to match the interest in 2004, however I was pleasantly surprised when January 2005 was bigger than January 2004, even without a Sevens Tournament to talk about.

Come February and it would seem everyone logged into OEE. February was the 3rd biggest month in the sites history even though the season hadn’t kicked off. Our coverage of the trial matches really gave us great exposure.

In March 2005 we had a new record month serving more than 211,000 pages but our all-time record was set in July 2005 with 222,517 page views averaging over 7,000 page views per day.

Our biggest day ever was Monday 21 March 2005 when Manly fans logged in to discuss John Hopoate’s hit on Sharks forward Keith Galloway. We served 13,054 pages and followed that up the next day with 12,621 page views.

The 2005 site was bolstered by increased interactive functionality such as the match result polls and the Supporter Photo Gallery. Additional content from Haig, JEF and Daniel helped propel the site to new heights.

We found that our demographic had changed, while more people were using the site than ever we are found that the News and other interactive sections were now bigger than the Message Board, and in fact while the Message Board is still recording more hits than ever its no longer the most visited page on the site.

At 6:20pm on the 22nd of August 2005 after eight and a half years online One Eyed Eagle closed down as we prepared for the launch of the new Official Manly Warringah Sea Eagles Website.