The idea of MyContractorList.com was founded by Jonathan Luciano in August 2006.
Original release date was November 2008 and re-released to the public in March 2011. Being an insurance contractor and working the 2004 Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, and Tropical Storm Bonnie and being caught in the middle of all of them including Ivan twice. I decided in August 2005 to take some time off before the next hurricane season really got going (2 weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit) I was thinking forever, I had no plans to return to this industry in any way ever again.
I was the Owner of 379 Peterbuilt Truck & 53’ trailer so I went over the road as a long haul trucker just to be left alone for a while.
With very little to no knowledge at all on how the Internet work (I didn’t even have an email account at the time) or how a website was developed a plan in my head was developing and soon I put it to paper. The idea of the site came from years of being on the road as an insurance contractor working natural disasters in almost every state east of the Mississippi. The task of finding the type of contractors & subcontractors needed in affected areas was always a challenge. Keeping up with so many different contractors in so many different states & their service areas, along with their contact information and/or disconnected phone numbers was a whole other issue. Finding the type of contractor needed online was simply to time consuming... confusing and with little results, in part due to the fact that all previous sites lumped all contractors into a limited number of categories and limited number of cities. After spending 2 years with different website programmers and many disappointments the initial release of the site was in November of 2008.
After the initial release date immediately followed a housing crisis that quickly developed into a bad economy to last for years, giving much needed time to re-evaluate the site and make many changes. The housing crisis was not only hard for the economy but also had a direct hit on my targeted audience but the truth was MyContractorList wasn’t ready for the public, especially for these bad economic times. With my realization and acceptance that MyContractorList had to be completely redone, it was time to decide what to do, so much time and money had went into this project and I really didn’t have anything the public wanted. I was broke and the economy wasn’t rebounding like we had hoped and I had to go back to the drawing board as far as the site was concerned. I spent the next two years learning how to write code, how databases work, PHP, Java, CSS... how the Internet works making changes everyday "live" on the site. Learning what works, what doesn’t, what looks good, what doesn’t, what the people want and what they don’t. I rewrote the entire site from cover to cover making many visual changes, while adding many additional pages and functions myself. Completely rewrote the databases but I must admit I did have some professional help from Chuck a good... who became a good friend from WebNet Creative to help with the databases and "fine tune" some things. The site was re-released to the public in February 2011 although the original design is still in place to this day the look and function of the site along with many valuable tools & resources have-been added and are available to members & non-members today. There are other websites out there, but none like MyContractorList.com