Singletracks History

Welcome to our website. Singletracks.com was created in 1998 by Leah Barber. Originally titled "Mudhunny," the site was located on geocities.com. Leah and her boyfriend at the time, Jeff Barber, wrote trail descriptions for trails they had both ridden. Because Leah was in school at Georgia Tech and Jeff was at Duke, they were able to ride trails in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. After riding several of the well known trails in those states, Jeff and Leah began to seek out more obscure trails and trail locations.

In the summer of 1999, Jeff and Leah decided to build the site into a more interactive format. That summer, singletracks.com was born. Still the site contained trails in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina but added the ability for users to create their own trail pages. It was only a matter of time before more states were added.

In the fall of 1999, singletracks.com made a deal with the US Mountain Bike Trail Project, located at tigerlair.com. The creator of the project agreed to release the contents of the project to singletracks.com, adding over 100 trails to the site. Singletracks.com had become a national site.

Today singletracks.com is still run by Leah and Jeff. Leah and Jeff were married in May of 2001 and moved to Colorado Springs, CO. After living in Colorado Springs for almost 4 years, Jeff and Leah are back on the east coast in Durham, NC where Jeff just finished his MBA at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke and Leah works for Performance Bicycle as the Internet marketing manager. Leah and Jeff have each ridden more than 120 trails from California to Georgia, almost 10% of the trails listed on the site today!

Singletracks.com is one of the few truly independent mountain biking sites on the net. Many of the features of singletracks seek to compete with larger, more established mountain biking sites like mtbr.com and others. The problem we see with sites like mtbr.com is that they are too commercialized. While mtbr.com's slogan is "For bikers, by bikers," the fact is that the owners themselves are not. Mtbr.com is owned by consumerreview.com, creators of babygearREVIEW.com, videogameREVIEW.com, and many others. Besides, how many product ads can you feature on a single web page? (at last count mtbr.com had 8 different advertisement spots on each trail page and 20+ on their homepage).

So that's pretty much it. You can see that singletracks.com is a small time operation but we are very proud of it. We would welcome any comments or ideas you might have for the site. We are constantly trying to come up with new ways to find your favorite trails and making the site as user friendly as possible. We use this site to find our favorite trails and we hope you will too. Please help us add to the trail database!

We are also testing some new features like product reviews and GPS-related mountain biking information. We're always looking for new ideas so let us know what you think. We used several Apple computers to create this site and we're currently using a sexy Apple 15" PowerBook. All of the editing has been done using BBEdit, a powerful text editing program for the Mac. Graphics have been done using Adobe Photoshop and we take our pictures with a Canon Powershot S45 (4 megapixel). If you're interested in extending the singletracks software model to another industry or niche, check out Review App. The first three versions of singletracks.com are shown below. The site is currently in Version 6.4 (give or take).

Our web host is American Web Hosting. They charge about $10 $170 a month (ouch!) plus $35 a year for the domain registration. We are also doing some advertising on Google and they charge about $0.08 per click. We cover our costs through our participation in the amazon.com associates program and google adwords (the ads at the bottom of each page, read more about how your can help us). We receive a comission for each item sold on Amazon so keep buying through our site! Even if you just click one of our Amazon links but end up buying something else, we still receive credit so use our links for all your Amazon purchases. Unlike some websites that cost millions to build and maintain, we know singletracks.com can sustain itself in the long term. When all is said and done, this site is a hobby and one that gives the creators a great deal of satisfaction.

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