After more than a year of work, I am incredibly pleased to finally introduce the rebuilt Wavemaker Staffords website.
Calling it a “new website,” however, doesn’t begin to describe what went into it.
Wavemaker has existed for almost 25 years. Over those years, the website became far more than a kennel page. It held decades of photographs, pedigrees, health information, articles, breed education, show history, memories, and the evolution of a breeding program. It was, in many ways, our digital history.
And then it was gone.
For many years, the technical management of Wavemaker, The Stafford Knot and, previously, SBT Mentor was handled by someone I trusted. As the sites grew increasingly complicated, I gradually lost the ability to independently manage much of what had been built.
That eventually became a serious problem.
The Stafford Knot developed significant and critical technical issues that required an extensive professional audit and considerable expense to identify and repair. That experience taught me an important lesson about maintaining ownership, access, backups and independent oversight of digital assets—particularly those belonging to a nonprofit organization.
Wavemaker presented an even more painful lesson.
A new virtual server had been purchased for TSK, using funds I provided, and the Wavemaker site needed to be migrated before its existing hosting expired. I had requested and reminded our longtime IT administrator about that migration over an extended period.
It did not happen.
Shortly after our working relationship ended, the old server expired. Wavemaker had not been transferred.
Approximately 25 years of the website disappeared with it.
There is a peculiar heartbreak in discovering that decades of your history—things you assumed would always be there—are suddenly inaccessible.
I had two choices.
I could mourn what was lost, or I could rebuild.
So I rebuilt.
Over the following year, with the help of the incredibly talented Zeshan Ahmed, I searched old computers, archives, backups, photographs, documents and the Wayback Machine. Pages had to be recovered or recreated. Information had to be verified. Photographs had to be located and reorganized. Some things could never be recovered.
The process required countless hours, outside professional help and many thousands of dollars.
But something unexpected happened along the way.
What began as an exhausting recovery project became an opportunity to reconsider what Wavemaker should be after 25 years.
The new site isn’t simply a reconstruction of the old one. It is cleaner, easier to navigate and, most importantly, once again under appropriate control with safeguards intended to ensure that this history cannot disappear so easily again.
There is also something fitting about launching it now.
Wavemaker is entering a different chapter. Our priorities increasingly include education, mentorship, preservation, The Stafford Knot, The Stafford Legacy Project, and the work underway at Wave-M Acres in Oregon.
Rebuilding the website reminded me that preservation isn’t limited to genetics.
We preserve dogs. We preserve history. We preserve knowledge. And sometimes we have to preserve the work itself.
Two decades cannot truly be recreated page by page.
But its story can continue.
Welcome to the new Wavemaker.
Built again. Built wiser. And built to last.
