| URL | http://epguides.com/ |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Entertainment |
| Registration | None |
| Owner | George Fergus |
| Created by | George Fergus, Dennis Kytasaari & John Lavalie |
| Launched | July 11, 1999 |
| Current status | Active |
epguides is a website dedicated to English language radio and television shows. George Fergus, the owner of epguides, began it in 1995 as a personal site at www.xnet.com/~fergus [1] with fan-compiled episode guides and lists for several hundred shows. But after it was recommended by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh in the seventh edition of their book The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, he established it as a separate domain name on July 11, 1999 as epguides.com, and it is under this name that it was again recommended in the eighth edition published in 2003. Since 1999 it has also been the principal episode guide website referenced in the FAQ of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.tv. [2]
The creators are George Fergus, Dennis Kytasaari and John Lavalie, who also established an information exchange with another upcoming website TV Tome and became meta-editors at that site and Movie Tome appointed by John Nestoriak III, the TV Tome and Movie Tome Webmaster.
After the selling of the Tome franchise to CNET, epguides set up a similar relationship with the new site TV.com. The rec.arts.tv FAQ now describes it with the words: "most useful as a superior 'front-end' to TV.com" guides [3].
Contents |
epguides television show pages consist of:
Example: 1
The main page displays basic information about the show, such as number of episodes and episode length. There is also an information bar at the top and bottom, in between is a list of episodes in order with air dates. The information bars consist of eight links for further information on the show.
The eight links on the information bars are:
Example: 3
The episode page displays a picture of the show's cast and all the show's episodes with guest stars, a synopsis and crew. There are links to IMDb for those who acted as the main characters and guest stars.
Epguides' relationship with TV Tome was established in June 2000. The creators of both sites decided to collaborate and started a relationship between the sites where all the information on epguides was transferred over to TV Tome and whenever information was updated on one site, it would automatically be updated on the other site. The Webmaster of TV Tome, John Nestoriak III, made the three founders of epguides meta-editors at TV Tome.
After the sale of TV Tome, epguides began a new relationship with the replacement site TV.com, though it eventually began using the database of TVTome spin-off site TVRage.com
Because of the dearth of Internet coverage for UK radio shows as compared to their US counterparts, radio shows were added to the epguides database in 2005, and there are now over 800 UK radio series episode lists on the site.