Mothership Gay Dating Timeline
As Mothership approaches her second birthday in August we’ve been looking back at her site development. Mothership has always strived to bring a fresh perspective to gay dating, and as the site has evolved one thing has remained constant - on Mothership you’ll get a totally unique experience - gay dating like never b4 - which is fun and upbeat, and in the words of one of our members ‘takes the sting out of gay dating’.
Mothership Gay Dating is born - and our neighbours make us a deelish 'fruit' cake
Here are our most prominent milestones in date order:
JUNE 2006 - Mothership conceived and site development starts.
AUGUST 2007 - Mothership Launches. A mad rush to get finished in time, in the end launching at 0020 on 18 August 2007. Our original site was very sci-fi themed. We’ve moved away from this now as we want to have much broader gay appeal, but you can still see a futuristic influence. Lots of press advertising, but also lots of glitches.
At least we got a lovely cake from our neighbours 
NOVEMBER 2007 - Introduce ‘Skylounge’ inflight magazine and ‘Motherboard’ gay forums. The Motherboard is still with us, but we dropped the Skylounge as we had to focus on site development - and now we have the Mothership Blog instead.
MARCH 2008 - Improved profiles with a YouTube movie embed facility and improved the messaging system including adding a ’suspected spam’ button after we suffered a major spam attack (from another gay dating site!)
APRIL 2008 - Hall of Fame for the winners of our ‘hottest guy’ and ‘coolest profile’ weekly polls, MIM (Mothership Instant Messenger) launched, facebook group and myspace page created, and come runner up in Boyz Awards 2008.
MAY 2008 - The first of our gay chat rooms created.
JUNE 2008 - The original Mothership Store opens - our first store sold our own branded merchandise. Mothership Gay Dating 2.0 introduced - the 2.0 version moved away from the sci-fi, and was more professional with places for advertising, better navigation and upgraded systems throughout the site.
AUGUST 2008 - Upgrade the messaging system. Introduce the amateur gay galleries 
NOVEMBER 2008 - New membership tier ‘Club Class’ is introduced with 14 extra features on top of ‘Crew Member’ level. All-new Mothership Store lauches in association with Bookworks Direct.
DECEMBER 2008 - New ratings system - rate your fellow crew members out of 10 - but you can’t vote below 5 because Mothership is a positive place!
JANUARY 2009 - Upload photos by text message facility
FEBRUARY 2009 - Upgrade by text message facility
MARCH 2009 - Mothership 2.5 introduced - fresher, crisper, brighter - move into the light!
APRIL 2009 - Twitter profile created - follow us at GayDatingUK!
MAY 2009* - New gay dating tool - GAY CRUSH TM launched. Upgrades to messaging system including auto-replies and address book, and upgrade to rating system.
So there we have it - how to build a gay dating site from scratch in 3 years! And we have lots of enhancements planned for the future.
In future posts about Mothership we’ll cover some of our highs, and lows.
* Coming soon!
(c) copyright 2009. All rights reserved.
Related posts:
Mothership - The Dream
eNewsletter 1 - Skylounge and Motherboard Gay Forums
eNewsletter Apr 08 - Boyz Awards Runner Up
eNewsletter June 08 - Mothership 2.0 - Hold on Tight
