Missing the online forums of days gone by and dismayed with the state of the remainder in the web space, I decided to take matters in to my own hands and created Webwide.
The project was featured in numerous industry online publications as well as featured on Product Hunt (#4 product of the day) and reaching the front page of Hacker News. The tremendous response meant that the website quickly grew to 1,000 users within our first few weeks.
The site was originally built using the XenForo forum software and carefully designed to meet the keen eye of my fellow designers and developers.
Ultimately, grating issues with the core XenForo platform and the lack of native mobile support combined with a shortage of time to market the free platform to new users meant it was no longer sustainable to keep running, but I had a huge amount of fun, introduced a ton of new connections and learned so much I have no regrets pursuing the project.
Not wanting to abandon the brilliant core community we’d created, I created a new Discord-powered community by the same name which runs to this day at webwide.chat.