ERIE, Pa. — Karleigh Santry is no ordinary teenager. At just 14 years of age, she has parlayed a simple fan club site for the popular Disney super group the Jonas Brothers (JonasBrothersFan.com) into what she hopes will become the next MySpace or Facebook, an online destination where millions of eager young fans come to discuss and trade information about their favorite teen heartthrobs.
While many teenagers would be happy just to have the number one online destination for fans of a popular Disney group with over 10,000 registered visitors in five months and 12,000 unique visitors per day, Karleigh envisioned something more; an umbrella site where fans could create their own websites for their favorite music artists and television actors. Thus was born FanGap.com, a website where users can create and host their own fan websites for free. In less than a week Karleigh has already fielded hundreds of requests for custom fan sites from teens clamoring to pay homage to their idols.
In March of this year, Karleigh found herself frustrated by the lack of information about her favorite band, the Jonas Brothers. She talked to her dad, a web architect with over 13 years in web development and they decided to create a community website for the Jonas Brothers where fans could collaborate via forums, get tour date information, blog, participate in polls and contests and upload images and video. Karleigh, an adept graphic artist, created all of the graphics and wrote all of the content for the website using a popular, free open source program called DotNetNuke. Soon the site began to grow; so much so that the website had to be moved to its own dedicated server and Google ads were introduced to cover the costs. Karleigh has been able to use the growing revenue from the site to attend Jonas Brothers’ concerts and, of course, to launch FanGap.com.
“I started this site for the fans. The users on my site are absolutely amazing and I couldn’t ask for anything better, without them, my site wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it is today and I am really thankful for that. Now, with FanGap.com, my users can duplicate JonasBrothersFan.com for their own favorite artist or group and stylize it with a custom look and feel,” says Karleigh.
An honor student who plays basketball and soccer, Karleigh will enter the 9th Grade this year. In her spare time, she listens to the Jonas Brothers, and hangs out with her friends, parents, Karyn and Patrick, sister Katie, and two brothers, P.J. and Danny.
More information:
Website: http://www.jonasbrothersfan.com
Website: http://www.fangap.com
All trademarks acknowledged.
[tags]Karleigh Santry, Disney super group the Jonas Brothers, favorite teen heartthrobs, FanGap fan website[/tags]
