HOGWired history Part 1
This is a brief history on the Official Arkansas Razorbacks website (Formerly HOGWired).
The first official Arkansas Razorback website was released in spring 1997 with the title HOGWired. The name was partially inspired by Florida’s NaviGator, which later became GatorZone.
HOGWired also came complete with the ultra catchy slogan “Get connected—Get hogwild—GET HOGWired”—Nice.
My cousin actually started one of the first Razorback fan sites and was contacted in ‘97 by the Athletic department, which eventually purchased the site from him. His site was originally hosted on his student account UofA Engineering servers. The other big dog back then was a site ran by Bryan called sooiee.com (still going as Hogcall.com).
Below are some screenshots of the first two sites from 1997. On the left is the site as it was first purchased then on the left is the design when it was moved to hogwired.com.
UPDATE: I failed to mention one very important part of Razorback History. The Razorbacks were actually beaten to the net by a full year when the Ladybacks opened their site in 1996. Of course the two departments are now combined and now share ArkansasRazorbacks.com. Thanks to Dr. Bill Smith for bringing this to my attention.
Hogwired.com Spring 1997
Bill Smith
Nice trip down memory lane, but you missed a couple of items. First, the first website actually was ladybacks.com, which predated the men’s site by a year. And the naming was not as much because of GatorZone as it was the lack of mechanism that we have today to deal with cybersquatters. Be happy to share more when at regular keyboard
londonhogfan
Thanks for the info Dr. Smith. I would love to hear more whenever you have time. Thanks, Jacob
Bill Smith
Sorry so long between notes — I think that’s our v2.0 ladyback site; the original had a white base back in 1996. There would even be a grey old, old school Mosaic version that was only for women’s basketball game stories and stats from fall 1995. The fall 1997 Hogwired was the 1.0 version that I designed, wrote and build the graphics for (the spring 1997 might be best called a beta, I don’t know that it fully launched and pretty sure was unnamed).
Jacob London
Great info. Now I’m finding some older stuff. I will update the post. Looks like the beta mens site was at “http://apsara.uark.edu/hogs” does that sound right?
I found one with a pink side table with this…
“Lady’Backs ON-LINE employs many advanced features like tables and multimedia. It is best viewed with an advanced graphic browser.”
along with a link to download the old Netscape browser. I love looking at old sites. Really takes me back to when I was first learning about html.
BTW. Thanks for the great twitter update over the Regional/super regional.
Jacob
Bill Smith
I’ve got NCAA track and some other immediate projects; plus a national presentation at CoSIDA — BUT, remind me later, I’m pretty sure I have back-ups of the old sites in HTML.