About Us

Hi my name is Ian, and I am the webmaster of Shademtw.com. I first found out about MTW in a preview in PCGAMER back in 2001, while I was still playing Shogun.

A few months later I started this web site dedicated, to what I believe is the greatest Strategy game to date. I launch my first version of this site in November 2001.

It was very basic, and the initial concept was to have a map of Europe with what was believed to be the fourteen playable factions. The idea was for the user to click on the faction on the map and it would take the user to a area on that playable faction. However, after initial trials this version had to be scrapped as the web page was to large and it took to long for the picture to load.

At this time I was receiving about 5-10 page hits per month.

The second page design was basically the first, but with the interactive map removed. This reduced the long download time. Information was starting to come together.

I was lucky at this period in time ,approx the end of Dec 2001, as Totalwar.Org featured my web site. This suddenly increased my page hits to 25 per day, then up to 100 per day.

This however, started to cause problems, as I was with Geocities, and these increased hit rates took me over my allocated bandwidth. This meant for large period of time, per day, they would take the site offline. Therefore nobody could access it. My first attempt to solve this problem was to move half of the site to another location. This had limited success, but helped. However, it was time for a redesign. Loose the graphics and create a few menu’s.

After some hard work over the early part of the new year, and a few reviews and graphics, the current version of the site was born. The shades logo didnt come along until later (When Honestus created Clan Shades new Clan site) But the layout came about, with drop down menus and fewer graphics. This redesign allowed less graphics and yet again the hit count increased to 250 ish per day. This again was causing problem.

So in approx May of 2002 the site was moved to a new server and the domain name shadesmtw.com was purchased. This has removed all the bandwidth problems and the current hit rate is approx upto 1000 views per day.

In the web site first 12 months we have gone from being viewed 5-10 per month to a total of 48000 views.

Thank you for your support and interest.