History of The Sun Shrine?

At first, I didn't even know HTML existed. I wandered through the net to sites like Serebii.net and wouldn't even ask myself how those sites were made.
I first started wondering about the actual making of sites when I accidentally bumped into a good looking little site called Lugia's Island. I was in the Webmasters section at serebiiforums.com and saw a Red Lugia (a.k.a. Silverwing) with an advertising banner in her signature linking to a Lugia's Island site. I gave it a shot; clicked the banner and entered the site. It had like, 15 pages of content but I really liked it and had a great time while browsing through the fun pages. I joined the forums and remained active since then. Until one day, with my limited knowledge of HTML and CSS, I decided to make a Pokémon site.

Inspired by Lugia's Island and The Cave of Dragonflies I made a site, built a layout and decided to call it The Sun Shrine. I had to make a good splash page and I spent like half an hour in Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady 8.0 just doing the picture -_- but it didn't turn out that bad and I've received compliments regarding it. I then made a first style (not very pokémon-ish) with colors matching the "Sun" theme, all in brown, orange and dark red and, in two days of hard work, the site was ready (I thought) to open, with some 10 pages of content. They were just 10, yes, but they were pages with solid and useful content like the EVs guide and the the list of pokémon and I really thought it was enough for the time being.

So, I opened the site in December 19th 2006 and advertised it in a couple of other pokémon sites I knew, result: the first day I had 10 unique visitors. I made the whole forums in two days and I was thrilled with the success the site had and the compliments I got from people telling me it had lots of potential so I made my first affiliation request. Since The Cave of Dragonflies was way out of my range, I tried Lugia's Island and got turned down... I was devastated and got a content block that lasted a couple of days until I decided to make an "Images" section that apparently freed me from the content block, and Silverwing suddenly changed her mind and accepted my affiliation request.
With my first affiliate and growing bigger each day at the topsites my moral was boosted and I started writing content like hell xD but half of it never did get public...

On Christmas Eve the site got 71 Unique visitors and by the end of the month we had a total of 500 unique visitors and three other affiliates: Arkeis, Eonlight Valley and The Valley of Nightmares.

Freewebs couldn't cover the sites growth for much longer so I requested Eeveeshq.com to host tSS and they, contrarily to my belief, accepted ^^. I was now able to have my pages as .php and installed CuteNews so people could comment on the site updates.

After a long period of inactivity due to a technical problem (PC went bananas xD), I returned to find this site almost dead. I'm still in continuing effort to bring people back...

The site is still growing and I hope it grows big ^^