The concept of RedHotDivas.com was devised in February 2000 after being annoyed by the lack of women of wrestling websites on the net, especially sites that cover women from the independents. After some careful thinking I decided that I'd launch a tribute website in the summer of 2000 and began collecting media, information etc for the yet to be named website. By April of 2000 the Diva scene was pretty popular in pro wrestling and newer stars such as Trish Stratus & Lita were starting to make an impact whilst the likes of Chyna, The Kat & Terri were dominating television. Over in WCW their female roster was taking a hit whilst ECW was pushing the boundaries with the likes of Francine, Dawn Marie & Jasmin. You could easily make the assumption that women of wrestling was reaching a new peak in the spring of 2000 and it was red hot and for all the right reasons and thus the RedHotDivas.com name came to me. By April I announced the impending Diva Website on my old freeserve website and via my reporting website, LordsofPain.net, and that it would debut in July.
By July 1st I had only managed to get half of the website ready and the launch was due to be that very day and things were not looking pretty. Foolishly I decided to open up the website to the viewing public and let's just say the feedback wasn't nice. Looking back I can fully understand where everyone was coming from in respect to their negative reactions to a website that they'd had high hopes for. For those of you that didn't find RHD from the start then I'll tell you a quick story about one of the main reasons the site sucked. Currently you enjoy our galleries, which contain thumbnail previews etc, right? Well back on July 1st I made the grave error of uploading full images and simply linking to them as if they were a hyperlink, the user had no way of previewing what they were about to view and it generally looked a mess. Although the feedback was bad as was the actual website, our traffic for that day was a lot higher than I'd expected. RHD had just over 3,000 visits on it's opening day and I was only expecting a few hundred hits as I'd never had a popular site before.
We'll now fast-forward two weeks as I closed RHD and decided to enlist the help of some friends and work on a better layout for the website. My chat buddies Sean & Fred joined the RHD team and together we relaunched RHD on August 1st 2000 and the website looked a lot better and the feedback was more rounded this time around. During the summer we also launched a Mailing List and we reached 4,000 subscribers, which was an amazing achievement for such a new website. Moving back to the relaunch of RHD and thankfully viewers hadn't given up on us after the lacklustre July 1st launch and we notched just over 10,000 visits on August 1st. By late August our traffic was constant and growing so we decided to expand the website a little to cover more women and slightly amended the website layout to include more content.
I'd like to rewind now and take you back to June 2000 as that's when it was revealed that Chyna would grace the pages of Playboy Magazine and boy was the net buzzing over this news. Fast-forward back to September 2000 and the pictures were starting to leak on the net and RHD decided to preview them for the world to see and help promote the issue. The WWE were also promoting the issue and it actually sold over 1.5 million copies and beat any previous sales records for Playboy. Why am I including this in the Evolution of RHD? Because it played a big part in getting our website noticed and exposed to new viewers. During the weekend that we previewed some of her pictures RHD received over 125,000 visits and this was around the time we were promoting our next new look and direction for the website. By Halloween 2000 we launched the site once more but this time the layout was even nicer and we'd once again expanded our content to include more features. For all of November 2000 we promoted the website like crazy and I actually had advertising companies approaching me and I got to experience some business activity at an early age. One of our newest features at RHD was Exclusive Interviews and we'd approached several Divas to take part and answer questions from their fans. This marked the start of a whole new RHD as we were really the only non-official website to allow fans the chance to ask their Favorite Divas a question and on a regular basis. We also jumped into the world of modelling and showcased various models in December 2000.
RHD would then create something that's still popular to this very day and that's our annual Year End Awards. Unlike other awards ours were solely voted for by the readers and many sites covered them and still do to this very day. 2001 was kicking in and so were we as our media offerings were increasing as were our daily news updates and coverage of the women of wrestling. After months of discussing contracts with various advertising networks I decided to sign with a New York-based group called Bla Bla and on January 20 we began placing their adverts and selling their products. RHD would also continue to improve their message boards as 2001 kicked in and we started to see a rise in members and activity. Our mailing list was relaunched in April and was known as The Diva Newsletter, which had over 7,000 subscribers and sent out weekly issues. The Newsletter featured news, gossip, rants, trivia, competitions and exclusive interviews with Divas before they'd hit the RHD website. Another new website layout was launched on May 2nd but it was only temporary whilst we had our main one developed. In late May RHD decided to drop the nudity from the website as we wanted to target all audiences and not be restricted to a certain age group. Also in late May I decided to turn our message boards into a separate website and they'd be known as DivaBoard.com. As June arrived our pictures were 99% hosted on our own space and we didn't rely on free hosting to house them. Our Diva Newsletter also gave subscribers a first look preview of a Torrie Wilson Interview, which we did prior to her WWE signing.
By August of 2001 I signed a new contract with UGO, which was a better advertising network. Also in August we finally finished our new website layout and ditched the temporary one. A Diva Newsline was created but would later vanish until it would be resurrected in late 2005. RHD continued to promote independent women in the fall of 2001 and ran a series of spotlight interviews, designed to educate fans on alternative women that they might not know of. The long-running GLOOW, a female promotion, invited RHD to go backstage to one of their shows in October of 2001 and we got lots of pictures and interviews. We began to add special themed galleries in late-October and they were a huge success amongst our viewers.
In November we launched our biggest competition to date, which saw one lucky winner win a PS2 alongside a SmackDown 3 video game. Speaking of the game we also launched a Video Games section in the previous month and the competition was a marketing tool to create interest in the section. In December of 2001 I decided to launch a new tradition here at RHD and that was our Special "RHD@Christmas" section, which featured holiday-themed Diva Content. We also released our 2001 Year End Awards results alongside a special 2001 Year in Review and 2002 Crystal Ball and we also broke some big news about the upcoming WWF Divas Magazine, Home Video and DVD. 2002 was finally here and we had our first legal issue of the year in the FIRST WEEK of January, this time it was ECW whom had a problem with us using there past material due to the on-going bankruptcy hearings. In late January we announced that the site will be getting its 5th major design. The design was put back until May so it could be 100% complete and it launche and got rave reviews and we ended up keeping it online for nearly 15 months.
2002 would be a somewhat quiet year for RHD as several staff members left and I'll admit I lost some interest in pro wrestling at the time and thus the site suffered a bit in terms of content. By the end of 2002 my interest had increased as things began to pick up and the WWE brand split was finally starting to work. Our coverage of the Dawn Marie/Torrie Wilson on-screen affair helped propel RHD back into the spotlight and snatched back some old viewers. In 2003 we did a complete U-turn with the direction of the website and began to design it in a way that would appeal to more female users. The RHD you see today wasn't what we had prior to 2003 as we filled the layouts with revealing photos of women in bikini's etc and this certainly wasn't an image that would attract female users. So in the spring of 2003 I asked a good friend of mine to help with a unique idea I had for RHD. Matt from our forums is an amazing cartoon artist and he kindly agreed to do cartoon versions of the Divas and my friend Justin designed the site to include them. The now female-friendly cartoon layout was close to being ready and we launched it in the summer of 2003 and started to target the female audience since our male audience was already in full effect. By the end of 2003 our statistics showed a growth in female users as did our message board users.
For pretty much all of the year 2004 and half of 2005 I sat back and watched RHD function as it was now at a point where we had everything in place and didn't have to worry about gaining visits and/or having enough content for people to enjoy. We'll now skip to the summer of 2005 as that's when RHD began to plan for the future and brand new projects were put into action. In August 2005 I had made the decision to study our website traffic alongside trends and see what users were enjoying and what they weren't enjoying. I found that more users were viewing content from the past than ever bother and I tested the waters by relaunching our Vault section as something of a flashback feature, which allowed users to relive past moments. Also I decided to once again put more of an emphasis on our news coverage and re-added our old Diva Newsline, which is now updated daily with round-the-clock Diva News. In October 2005 RHD decided to work on a tribute website for the Fabulous Moolah and by the end of 2005 we owned FabulousMoolah.com and were busy developing it for a January 06 launch. We also purchased the rights to use Sharmell.net, JillianHall.net & Lilian-Garcia.com, all of which would be turned into small fan sites in 2006.
In early 2006 RHD were busy formulating plans for a new layout, which would once again incorporate our unique cartoon theme. Matt worked on some great new artwork for the layout and we enlisted the help of Will from Vindictive Designs to create a layout that's fresh and can feature a lot more than the old layout could. On April 22nd 2006 the new layout finally debuted and RHD hopes to work closely with the independent women in 2006 to bring you the very best overall coverage of Women in Pro Wrestling.