The early years
Back in 1999, when I was 14 years old, I have a school assignment. I had to code a website myself in HTML. I could chose myself what subject it would be about. Since I loved Marilyn Monroe for many years, the choice was easy. So I made a website, very simple. Later on I made a improved version, I can remember it was red with white, in which I used a Milton Greene image. Because I had no idea how to get a website online, I kept it all on my harddisk.

Untouched Beauty
Over the years I got more interested in webdesign and my skills were getting better. I opened an account at Geocities and launched the first version of my Marilyn Monroe website online in September 2003. I named the website Untouched Beauty, after a quote from the photographer Bert Stern. It was still very basic, with a biography, a filmography and some other content. I don’t even think it had a proper image gallery.

Enter Simply Marilyn, exit Simply Marilyn
In June 2004, it was time for a change. I felt like Untouched Beauty was not the best name for the fansite because it hadn’t Marilyn’s name in it. I needed a name that connected to Marilyn.
I picked Simply Marilyn. After only a couple of days after the re-lauch I got an email of a girl who told me her website was also called Simply Marilyn and that I should take the website down. Unfamiliar with legal rights to this, I took the website down after almost a year (May 15, 2005), because too many people got confused with the two fansites. Still, at times, I think this name would be great and I should have never given in, since the other website was only online for a few months and has been offline for years now.

MarilynFan.org
In June 2005 I bought a domainname for my Marilyn Monroe fansite. I had always hosted the fansite on my personal domain, but as the website was growing and expanding, I thought it was time for a domain. I choose MarilynFan.org. It’s simple but it describes exactly what my fansite is: a Marilyn Fan website.

MarilynFan.org has been online since 2003 and hasn’t been offline since. It’s one of the oldest fansites about Marilyn Monroe and surely the oldest that’s still being updated.