My name is Andy Savage, I was born and raised in Derby, Derbyshire, England. This section of my website details when, How and why this website came into existence.

In July 1998 I created my first website pages using the free space I got with my Internet provider. On this site I had a single page with a few photographs of Derby on it, which I had taken from the top of Derby Cathedral in 1995 and 1998.
The photographs were not very good quality because the 1995 ones were snap shots digitised from video and the 1998 ones were taken with my very first digital camera, this had a maximum capacity of 10 shots at 640x480!

By the way these 'original' photographs are still on the internet, Click HERE to see them.

These poor photos had been on my personal website for over 3 years, Then on the 16th of May 2001 I received an e-mail from a Peter Farrel in Arkansas, USA, Here's what he sent...

Thanks for the memories Andy. I left Derby in 1981 to come to Arkansas in the States. I was born at The City Hospital, raised on Uttoxeter Road, and then in Littleover, and went to Bemrose before girls were allowed (shame :-( ). It was a lot of fun clicking through your site, and brought back many fond memories. It appears that Derby has remained a very special place. You web site is excellent, and caused me to spend almost an hour away from my work :-).

I'll be back
Pete

Peters' e-mail was the catalyst for creating this website, I had just got a new digital camera and was becoming quite skilled at creating web pages so I suddenly realised that I had all that I needed to create a dedicated Derby section on my website. There were a few Derby specific websites on the internet but they all seemed either very out of date, run by companies or featured very small badly taken photographs.

I kicked off the site by taking photographs from the top of Derby cathedral and then started taking pictures of famous Derby buildings. I found after a few weeks of adding photos that I was running out of web space on my free web space domain so I decided to buy my own domain.

I bought www.absolutelyandy.com on 12th June 2001 and created a Derby section on it. This new website had 100mb of web space so I thought this would never fill up.
By the way the reason for the domain name is due to me liking a certain Scottish comedy sketch show called Absolutely, for which there is a dedicated page on my website.

After weeks of taking photographs and putting them on my site, I thought it would be nice to also put a bit of history on there too. This was when things really started to take off.
At school I did not enjoy History at all, I found it boring but since creating this website I have discovered that it is very enjoyable. You don't have to rely on books either, Everyone has a bit of info for you if you ask about.

Another major point was reached around the beginning of July 2001 when my Derby section became listed in google, From this point I started to get e-mails from people around the world who used to live in Derby that had found my site and fell in love with it.

Over the months I kept adding new areas of Derby and Derbyshire.

By May 2002 my 'Derby section' had grown so much that it had 870 photographs on it, It was getting very popular with visitors and I decided that it was time to buy a dedicated domain name just for the Derby section.

So, on 15th May 2002 I launched www.derbyphotos.co.uk I moved the entire Derby section from my www.absolutelyandy.com website to this new domain. I placed auto-redirects on all the pages on
www.absolutelyandy.com so that anyone visiting from old search engine matches would arrive at the new site.

Because this new website was completely dedicated to Derby and Derbyshire I was able to take it a lot further by adding new features to it. Also the web host offered a lot more options such as ASP, PHP4 etc. This meant I could add things, which were not possible on my previous two incarnations of my Derby site.

Since May 2002 the site has gone from strength to strength, growing in popularity week by week.
most visitors to the site arrive by search engines but quite often they arrive by following links from other websites which have linked to my site.

Today (June 2004) my site now has one 1330 photographs and features just about all of the suburbs of Derby City and 42 Derbyshire villages. Also night photographs, panoramic photographs, immersive interactive panoramic photographs, now and then photographs, Guest book, Electronic post cards, Screensaver, Quiz etc etc etc.
Total visitors to my site by June 27th 2004 now over 221990.

So all I can say is thanks to Peter Farrel for inspiring me into creating this site.
Because I created this site it has inspired Peter to do the same for what has been his home for 20 years.
Also he created a website devoted to ex pupils of Bemrose school, Derby.

Please support him and take a look at his great website promoting Arkansas by visiting his site here http://www.picturearkansas.com/

Dedicated to Peter, Thanks for inspiring me.
Andy Savage 27th June 2004