About Us

The Kentucky Band Website is provided as a public service for the staff, students, alumni, parents and fans of Kentucky School Bands.

This page contains a chronological account of the evolution of kyband.com.
July 2000The domain name kyband.com is registered and the web site is opened by Rick Gardner of Greenville, Kentucky. The site is billed as the The Kentucky Band Internet Community. The site offered chat, free email, forums, a guest book and links. The site was hosted on Virtual Avenue which was a free host at that time.
May 2001kymarchinghistory.50megs.com is opened by Kristin Childers of Paducah, Kentucky. The site is named Kentucky High School Marching Bands. The site began archiving marching band information including repertoires, directors names and KMEA placement back to 1986. (The first year for the KMEA SMBC). Also, contest information including scores, is made available starting with the 2001 marching season.
September 2002The two websites began to work in association. Rick Gardner begins to design the home page for both sites. The kyband.com site is renamed "kyband.com in association with Kentucky Marching Bands" the name for the 50megs site is also changed to reflect the new association.
September 2003 The two domains began sharing the same home page. The names of both sites are changed to "kyband.com and Kentucky Marching Bands".
March 2004 The home page for kymarchinghistory.50megs.com is closed. All visitors to that domain are forwarded to the kyband.com home page. Both sites are merged at this time. All pages are available through kyband.com and the the 50megs site is used to archive the marching band portions of the site.
June 2004Repertoires prior to 2002 are removed from the website. Due to copyright issues with several band programs the historical repertoires were removed from the site. We still have them and hope that we may be able to restore them in the future.
January 2005Chris Teesdale joins kyband.com to assist with the Calendar and News pages.
August 2005All pages at kymarchinghistory.50megs.com are mirrored at kyband.com so the marching information will be available to school networks that are blocking websites using 50megs.com hosting.
October 2005The KMEA State Marching Band Championship celebrates its 20th year and recognizes kyband.com for providing the state championship information from the last 20 years.
November 2005All files at kymarchinghistory.50megs.com are moved to the new sub-domain at marching.kyband.com. Pages at kymarchinghistory.50megs.com are no longer being updated.
February 2006Rick Gardner webmaster for kyband.com presents a technology session at the 2006 KMEA Conference on "How to set up and maintain a classroom website".
May 2006The kymarchinghistory.50megs.com site is restored to a stand alone site so that websites with links to those pages will continue to work.
April 2007The kyband.com website exceeded 1.5 million visitors.
September 2008The kyband.com website exceeded 2 million visitors and over 9 million pages viewed.
May 2009The kyband.com website exceeded 2,220,000 visitors and over 9,500,000 pages viewed.
December 2009The kyband.com website exceeded 2,450,000 visitors and over 10,130,000 pages viewed.
July 2010The Kentucky Band Website has been serving the Kentucky School Band Community for 10 years.
January 2013The kyband.com website exceeded 3,500,000 visitors and over 15,000,000 pages viewed.
January 2014The kyband.com website exceeded 3,900,000 visitors and over 16,100,000 pages viewed.
February 2014Rick Gardner and the Kentucky Music Educators Association entered into an agreement that will allow the Executive Director of KMEA to provide contest scores, contest information and band information to kyband.com.
October 2014During the 2014 marching season the kyband.com website experienced several outages due to the heavy server load and lack of cooperation from the host. After 10 years as a customer of that host the decision was made to find a new provider at the end of the 2014 marching season.
January 2015kyband.com completed the move to their new web hosting provider at KOHosting.net. All of the website survived the move except for the links directory. It was restored manually a few weeks later.
July 2015The Kentucky Band Website has been serving the Kentucky School Band Community for 15 years.
The kyband.com website exceeded 4,200,000 visitors and over 17,250,000 pages viewed.
July 2016The Kentucky Band Website has been serving the Kentucky School Band Community for 16 years.
The kyband.com website exceeded 4,525,000 visitors and over 19,775,000 pages viewed.
May 2019The Kentucky Band Website has been serving the Kentucky School Band Community for 19 years.
The kyband.com website exceeded 5,357,000 visitors and over 27,730,000 pages viewed.
December 2022The Kentucky Band Website has been serving the Kentucky School Band Community for 22 years.
The kyband.com website exceeded 6,000,000 visitors and over 30,000,000 pages viewed.