25 years of the German Genesis Fanclub website

Yesterday, today, tomorrow – all good things

A personal look back at the beginnings of the German Genesis fan club website it 25 years ago.

When the German Genesis fan club was founded in November 1991, the internet was still in its infancy. As a fan, the only way to get information about your favorite band was to know other (older) fans personally, or through the few books available (actually only those by Armando Gallo) and through fan clubs and their magazines. And with the latter, our club also got started and published a total of 27 issues by December 1999 – from photocopied leaflets to offset-printed magazines..

Despite our constant efforts to always have the latest information in the magazine, we eventually realized that there was no way around switching from print to web at some point. The advantages were obvious—we could reach a much larger audience and publish information immediately after we learned about it. We tackled the project at the end of 1999. But the transition wasn't that easy, because neither Peter, Bernd, nor I (Christian wasn't on the team yet) had the slightest clue about web design. So we got some help. And it quickly became clear that you couldn't just apply the familiar structures from print media identically to a website.

Today, web content has to be designed in such a way that it looks good on a wide variety of devices, from smartphones and tablets to 27" monitors at home. Back then, there were no iPhones or iPads, and anyone who had a 17" monitor on their PC was unusually well equipped. But there were other problems. Transfer speeds in the days long before DSL were appalling, and surfing the internet was often a test of patience. As a web designer, you were therefore required to keep graphics small so that pages didn't take minutes to load. Anyone who didn't experience it can't even imagine it today. In the end, our first website was a compromise between what we wanted to do and what was technically feasible and sensible.

The club's first website went online on March 1, 2000. It is no longer possible to determine exactly what we published in this first version – probably not very much. That is the problem with the internet – content comes and goes and, after many years, can usually no longer be accessed or restored. A printed book or magazine, on the other hand, can still be read even after decades or even centuries if it is stored properly. Be that as it may, this early version, as a relic from our magazine days, still had a password-protected area reserved for club members.

As before, an annual fee was payable. In return, members no longer received a magazine, but a password to access this content. This would no longer be done today, except for certain web content that still requires payment. In any case, we soon realized that this was neither contemporary nor sensible, and so in November 2001, the site became freely accessible to everyone. Around the same time, the first forum on our website went online, enabling direct exchange between fans. We couldn't offer this in this form during the magazine era either.

For a good year, from mid-1994 to the end of 1995, there was an English version of it magazine. However, the effort involved was simply disproportionately high at the time. We then revisited the idea for our website, not least to make our content accessible to even more fans. From the end of 2004, more and more English translations of some of the content became available. And in January 2006, this resulted in a separate, entirely English-language website for the fan club with its own internet address: www.genesis-news.com.

Since then, there have been numerous changes to the website, ranging from minor graphical modifications to complete redesigns. We have consistently attempted to preserve as much content as possible from the previous website and transfer it to a new format. This has become increasingly challenging over time because, as mentioned earlier, the graphics from the early days were only available in very low resolution. In 25 years, technology has developed rapidly, and today large image files are hardly a problem anymore.

Nowadays, people are already surprised when a website doesn't load in the blink of an eye. And constantly meeting the demands placed on a website in terms of readability and functionality on all devices is something we have to keep an eye on all the time. Because an "old" website not only looks bad and sometimes only works in a rudimentary way, it is also open to hacker attacks. Nobody expected that in 2000 either.

What other innovations did the Internet age bring? Oh yes, email was invented at some point and became more popular than letter writing, faxing, or even telephoning in the 1990s. And so, after we went online, the fan club also offered an email newsletter service for quite some time, which provided more or less weekly updates on all the latest Genesis news, as well as editorials from the editorial team and similar current topics. As the website became more frequent, this became less important and we always posted all news immediately on the website.

We now have 25 years of it website behind us, during which time not only has the website itself changed dramatically, but also the way, when, and where we work on the website today and everything else that goes with it. For example, the club has social media accounts on all popular platforms. And all of this needs to be maintained and kept up to date. A host of helpers support us in this, as well as in the daily work on the German and English websites and the associated forums.

What could be managed by the editorial trio and a handful of authors in the magazine era required additional help when the website was launched, even for the first simple website. And today, the circle of those who devote their time and energy to the fan club has grown even larger.

On this anniversary, we would like to remember this and express our sincere thanks to all those who have helped us in one way or another over many years of print and web publications. However, Christian has been the linchpin of the website and the club for many years. Without him, Peter, Bernd, and I would have thrown in the towel long ago. Therefore, he deserves our greatest thanks, because even with many helping hands, you need one person to coordinate everything, keep things on track, and invest a lot of time and energy in the project. And that is exactly what Christian is. Thank you!

But we must also look to the future. None of us are getting any younger, even the youngest members of the band will eventually reach retirement age. And our "heroes" of the Genesis universe are also getting older and quieter and will probably no longer record music or go on tour, or only do so for a few more years.

Some have even already passed away… Paul Young, John Mayhew, Ronnie Caryl, and Richard Macphail. Others are "still not dead yet." But the clock is ticking for all of us. And unlike TV series, we don't have the "next generation" waiting in the wings to take over and continue the fan club at some point on day X. Our plan is therefore to keep the project alive for as long as possible, to keep up with technological advances, and to secure the necessary funding. Perhaps by then we will have found a team that is willing and able to continue our work. Otherwise, our descendants will eventually pull the plug—the fan club website will disappear into digital nirvana and become history. Then, at the turn of the next century, today's 20-year-old fans will talk about the good old days when the it website still existed… and reverently leaf through one of the rare it fan club magazines from 1991 to 1999.

Author: Helmut Janisch (March 2025)