The VINTAGE CARAVANS Website - Where it all began

[Don Ricardo]

The VINTAGE CARAVANS Online Community

Today the Australian Vintage Caravans online community can be found in a multitude of locations, and people with an interest in Vintage caravans communicate via a range of social media - websites, Facebook, Instagram, etc. But the online community in Australia began with the launch of the VINTAGECARAVANS.COM website in 2002 by West Australian vintage caravan collectors Mark Taylor and his then partner Jeni.

Prior to the establishment of the Vintage Caravans website, many people all around Australia had had an interest in 'old caravans', often because they had a classic car and having a caravan from the same period as the car made a good looking combination. There had also been informal 'vintage caravan rallies' run in a few locations by groups of people with a classic car and an 'old caravan'. However the VINTAGECARAVANS.COM website established by Mark and Jeni was the first attempt in Australia to connect people with 'old caravans' together and to promote an interest in the caravans themselves. 

For the purposes of the website, Mark defined a 'Vintage Caravan' as a caravan built before 1 January 1970, and that definition has been widely adopted within the Vintage Caravan community, even if its validity has been debated from time to time.

Following the website, Mark and Jeni established this 'Vintage Caravans Forum' which became live on 26 July 2004. You can read the first post on the Forum here. Subsequently, Mark and Jeni also established a 'Classic Caravans Forum' for people interested in Classic caravans, defined as caravans built between 1 January 1970 and 31 December 1979. As it happens there is a huge overlap between caravans built in the 1960's and those built in the 1970's in terms of design, styles, construction materials and manufacturers, so the distinction between Vintage and Classic caravans is certainly not a hard one.

The original VINTAGECARAVANS.COM website was decommissioned several years ago, and no longer exists. The website URL has now been allocated to someone else with no apparent interest in Australian Vintage Caravans. However, the images below show the pages of the website as it originally appeared in 2002, and are shown here for historical purposes and to honour the contribution made to the Vintage Caravans online community in Australia by Mark and Jeni.

HOME PAGE



MENU PAGES

The menu on the Home page took readers to the following pages. Please note that the pages have been cropped to provide maximum readability. On the original pages the various photos could be clicked with a mouse to provide a larger image.






Joker II Logbook

[Franklin1]

2002 November

This is the earliest record of the vintagecaravans(dot)com domain name, taken from the internet archives (the Wayback Machine):

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2004 March

A change was made to enable contact through a web mail link at the top of the page:

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2004 August

The "Discussion Forum" has commenced by this time, with the link near the bottom of the page in yellow text:

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2010 December

A "Forum Member Profiles" initiative had been introduced, where members paid to have the story of their vans linked to the home page:

The list of stories is shown as follows:

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2013 March

The layout of the home page has undergone a significant change:

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2021 March

The website name has been changed to vintagecaravans.proboards(dot)com:

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2022 January

The vintagecaravans domain name appears to now be dormant:

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Note to Don Ricardo: feel free to edit/change/relocate any of the above thread or info.

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How to use the Wayback Machine: archive.org/web/

1. Type web address in field and press [Enter]. Wait for response.

2. Click on any of the years that the archives show a result (the black bars). 2015 is used as an example. A calendar for that year will show dates that the web pages were archived. Move your mouse pointer to find a date that has a pop-up time stamp attached to it (example July 9). Click on that time stamp.