About CelicaHobby.com
CelicaHobby.com is a website for Celica Enthusiasts. We are a community of people who currently own or have owned Toyota Celicas. If you have any interest learning about the Celica, this is the place for you.
CelicaHobby opened in 2008, using the source code and information from EverythingCelica as a starting foundation. There was an enormous amount of valuable information contained in the EverythingCelica database and it would have been a complete waste to let it go unshared.
Although much of the current information and presentation is reminiscent of EverythingCelica, that is where the similarities end, and the distinction begins. Our community forums are focused towards creating and sharing information, less toward post-counts and dates of the post. If a topic was created a while ago, and there were unanswered questions in that topic, does it really matter when it was created? Your questions are still relevant and should be added to the topic. The primarily focus of CelicaHobby is all about sharing information and content about the Toyota Celica and related topics.
With that said, enjoy your time spent at CelicaHobby, contribute, discuss and make friends.
History
EverythingCelica was founded in 2001 by Isaac DeCoursey. As the site grew bigger, so did my responsibilities with the events, the auto parts e-commerce store, maintenance of the large social networking website and managing the constantly growing abundance of reference materials.
I went from being a simple Celica enthusiast, to being an event coordinator & photographer, an html/php/sql programmer, setting up and maintaining a dedicated hosting server, running an aftermarket auto parts pickup, packaging and shipping company averaging fifty to a hundred orders every day, along with keeping up with the daily feedback emails from customers and casual website members... all the "fun stuff" that a larger company usually staffs many employees to maintain.
In Early 2005, I found that I didn't have enough time to continue to add features or constantly update the site's infrastructure to better deal with the traffic spikes, keep up with daily pickups, packaging and shipping demands, attend all the local Celica events and photograph them, and even check all of the hundreds of unread emails for days on end (I did read each and every email that landed in my inbox)... all the usual day-to-day maintenance which EverythingCelica required.
In July 2004, Toyota announced the Celica (as well as the MR2) would be discontinued in the United States at the end of the 2005 model year due to lack of sales. Celica sales hit 52,406 units in 2000, but dropped sharply to 14,856 in 2003. Just 8,710 Celicas were sold in 2004, and only 3,113 were sold in 2005. The sports coupe market, in general, was rapidly shrinking. The Subaru XT6, Nissan 240SX, Honda Prelude and Mazda RX-7 were already gone and the Acura RSX was soon to follow.
With all of that in mind, in April of 2005, I foresaw that there would be a sharp decline in the "customization-scene" interest over the immediate upcoming years. I did the numbers, and watched the traffic of EverythingCelica.com and it's competitors. It was time to move forward with my next big projects. I tied up all of the loose ends by closing up shop and closing out/refunding all current orders. I notified all of my business associates. I then moved forward with my new development projects.
It was extremely tough to quit working on every aspect of EverythingCelica, something which I so thoroughly loved doing, but it was impossible to give it the incredible amount of maintenance and attention it needed, and the industry, as a whole, had peaked and began showing signs that it was headed towards a decline. With the intended goals for CelicaHobby (outlined up top) as a new part-time arrangement, this seems to be like the perfect balance of advancing my professional career and spending more time on these side-projects which I really enjoy.
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