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Lavender Town

Welcome to Lavender Town, home of Pokemon sites from the past. This is an idea that I have had for a few years now ever since some of the best Pokemon sites disappeared from the Internet. It was created to pay homage to Pokemon sites that helped inspire a new generation of Pokemon Webmasters that own sites today. Back in the day PHP didn't exist. The average Pokemon site consisted of one page on a free host. The sites listed below made a huge impact and for that I am commemorating them because they deserve a proverbial pat on the back for setting precedent. These sites were all special and still stand up today as great sites if they were still around. They set the standards of layouts divided by games, anime and TCG. If you remember an amazing Pokemon site that I haven't mentioned, please send me an email with the site's name, a detailed description of what was special about it and why and/or when it closed down.

Pikamon

One day when I was bored I accidentally discovered this site when I typed in the URL www.pikamon.com and this snazzy site came up. It had one of those coming soon logos up with its own theme music, which went like this: "Pi-Pi, Pi-Pi, Pikamon!" When the site finally opened it had the most unique Pokemon layout I have ever seen. Basically, the entire layout was using Ash's pants, including his belts for major links like forums. I remember they had this cool tournament where people would vote which Pokemon would win in a battle. I think my favorite section of the site was the comic section, which had one comic that I remember with Misty cooking poor Psyduck in the oven and saying something like "hot enough for you?" The sad part is that this site didn't even last longer than a year. I got to talk to the Webmaster once, who was from the UK; he said that his host, Jaxel of the UPNetwork was a jack@$$, which caused me to laugh out loud. It's really a shame that is closed down because there hasn't been anything as unique since that I'm aware of.

Pokemon Fan Fiction Archives (PFFA)

This site used to be one of the flagship sections of Bulbagardens back in the day. Once Bulbagarden closed up shop, they moved to a free host. This is the first site that introduced me to fan fiction. Basically fans of Pokemon would write an episode about their favorite characters and send it to the PFFA to be posted. The PFFA had many categories of fan fics such as AAML and comedy. I remember when I wrote a story that I wanted posted, but it was in script format so it wasn't accepted. That's what inspired me to make my own site so I could control what I wanted people to read. The downfall of this site like most sites was when the updates started to get farther apart. At one point there was like no updates for over a year. To this day I'm still sad since there was a nice compellation of fan fics that I didn't get to finish reading by some young aspiring writers.

Ash and Misty's Love (AAML)

This is a site that helped coin the term AAML that we use to describe to this day the love between Ash and Misty. Fans endlessly argue if Ash and Misty really have a thing for each other, so this site was created to help prove their love by listing love hints for every Pokemon episode. I remember reading through all the episode hints before I would watch an episode and trying to find some that they missed. The site had an excellent exclusive interview up with the voice of voice of voice of Ash. The site was pretty good for a laugh. Like most Pokemon site owners, the Webmistress outgrew Pokemon and now she concentrates on creating cosplay costumes, which I must say look really good. I especially like her cute Misty costume, which was all the talk at Pokemon forums a couple years ago. If you want to see what's she up to now, check out her personal website: www.summoner-yuna.net

Pokemon Lodge

Pokemon Lodge was one of my first affiliates ever. Hypermart hosted them at the same time as me. The owner of the site, Will was kind enough to accept me as an affiliate when his site was a lot better than mine. I really bonded with Will when we both got deleted from Hypermart for using unlicensed Ultimate Bulletin Boards (UBB), before vBulletin was so popular. We lost everything since we didn't know any better about keeping a backup copy. Will told me I could recover my layout if I used my temporary Internet files. I was about to give up because I lost hours of content, but he helped me change my mind and my site was back and better than ever thanks to him. If you want to see his latest work check out www.iceshadow.net

The Pokemon Top 50

From 1999-2001 this was the measuring yard in terms of topsites. Just to be in the top 500 was a big honour. I remember checking everyday to see how high I was. I got really happy when I started to pass some of my affiliates. I remember that Psypoke was always the top Canadian site; I eventually made it into the top 10 Pokemon sites in Canada. The highest I ever made it was around 200, which really says something about how many quality Pokemon sites there used to be when Poke-Mania was running wild, brother! Sadly, the Pokemon Top 50 was shut down for Nintendo during their "close any sites that have Pokemon in the domain name" campaign. There has never really been a topsites like it; the Pokemon Top 100 is good, but it's not the same.

Diglett's Cave

If you've been a Pokemon fan for the past 5 years, you have to have heard of this cool site. They were one of the few Pokemon sites to have a flash Intro; a Diglett would pop up its head and a Pokeball would roll by it with the song "What Kind of Pokemon Are You?" playing in the background. Diglett's Cave was my first affiliate ever, which I really appreciate them being nice enough to add me when my site wasn't that great to start. The Webmaster was a very talented artist; however, all of the female characters he drew seemed to have big chest sizes (we can dream can't we?). Sadly one day the site disappeared, but I'm sure with the Webmaster's talent he is making big money from web designing right now.

PikaPals

Back in 2000 when the average Pokemon website consisted of a basic layout hosted on Angelfire, PikaPals was in its prime. They had this service where you could apply to get your own Pikapal for your website. Essentially, a PikaPal was a pet Pokemon, which you displayed on your website and it could gain levels, evolve and do all sorts of cool things. A link was included back to the PikaPals website; almost every Pokemon Webmaster had one of those things on their site. The last thing I remember of Pikapals is the Webmaster posting a message about him closing down his site due to his grandmother being sick, which is a sad way to end such an unique and inspiring site.

Pokemon Survivors

Who hasn't heard of the show Survivor? Well essentially this site was the same thing. Pokemon webmasters each week would try to gain immunity and if they failed the test, they would post polls on their website trying to get their visitors to vote off the other sites. It was a really fun concept that hopefully will return in the future.

Psypoke

The Psychic Pokemon Connection or Psypoke for short was one of the first Pokemon sites I found when I typed Pokemon into the search engines. Back in the day they were in the top 10 in the Pokemon Top 50, which meant a lot. They had daily updates, great content, forums and plus they were Canadian! The Webmaster's name was AbraKadabra, which inspired me to name my site after my favorite Pokemon, Alakazam. Psypoke was so big that at one time they even hosted Serebii.net, which is the top site right now. Psypoke returned a year ago under new management, but they'll never be able to capture my interest like the old site did.

UPNetwork

UPNetwork was famous for being run by Jason Axelrod or Jaxel for short, a Webmaster who was notorious for being very rude and impatient. His reputation however, didn't stop him from owning one of the top 3 Pokemon sites on the Internet at one time. He was the site all the Pokemon up-and-comer Webmasters wanted to be hosted by. If UPNetwork hosted you, it was the big times. I applied for hosting from them, but didn't even get a response back. UPNetwork hosted all of the big sites like Zapchu, Pokemon Realm and Pikamon. Their downfall was when Jaxel got greedy and wanted to sell his domain name for thousands of dollars. Someone bought it and now it's just a page to nowhere. UPNetwork did return, but it's a different site under new management. Whatever happened to Jaxel I have no idea, but I'm sure he's making tons of money right now since that's all he seemed to care about back then.

PP-Network

Jiggly or Scott took over as the number one Pokemon host on the Internet after Jaxel's UPNetwork closed. Their site lacked in terms of content, but they had a forum with thousands of members. What makes this site important is that they hosted some very big sites like Serebii.net, SquirtlePower, Viridian Forest and Poke Sky. The site eventually changed names to Total Anime before closing down for good. Jiggly is now married and works for vBulletin and credits his Pokemon site for inspiring him to become a web programmer.

Poke Cloud

Run by Mewchu, Poke Cloud got really big when it finally got its own domain name. I became good friends with the owner of Poke Cloud as both our sites were doing well. Mewchu was a very good artist and liked to draw Pokemon, including her trademark Mewchu, which was part Mew and Pikachu. Mewchu or Jillian closed down her site when she was too busy with volleyball and high school. Now she is in college and playing pro volleyball. She seems to have disappeared online, so if anyone knows what her email is please let me know.

Pokemon Factory

If you've ever heard of the term Fakemon, then this is the site where it came from. PokeFactory would post fake Pokedex entries with made up Pokemon like Pikablu. Visitors could send in their own creations and have them posted. It was a really unique and neat site, but updates soon ceased and the site disappeared from the net.

The Poke Masters

This was the #1 Pokemon site online for a long time. They weren't just your average cookie-cutter Pokemon site; they had tons of unique content and an extensive Pokedex. My favorite part of their site was their articles on each type of Pokemon; I remember waiting each week for the new one to be published. The Poke Masters fell victim to its own popularity. Due to using so much bandwidth and losing some major advertisers, they had to close down. Now they are only message forums, which is sad because Kevin, the former owner had the best site online at one time.

PokemonPalace.net

Pokemon Palace was a palace of a site, that ran for many years. It was your to-go place for unique content and a new insight into the Pokemon world. They also covered a wide variety of content, and gave birth to one of the biggest Pokemon forums on the internet. The site closed for somewhat unknown reasons - it was rumored the owner got in trouble with the law, while some say he had infrigned on Nintendo's copyright. In the end, maybe he just needed a scape goat - its hard to know.