Quote:
Originally Posted by legion80
But holy cow that site looks like it's from a 1990s geocities account.
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That site has been around for a very long time, the labor of love of one person, Jay Pfahl. In 2006 (when the site only had about 6000 species), the small orchid business that Jay had been using to support the site (and buy the expensive reference materials that he utilizes) was destroyed by a hurricane. At that point he asked, on the bulletin board in use at the time (predecessor to forums), if people might donate to help him continue to buy reference books. I suggested that he utilize a PBS/NPR model, asking for a voluntary small subscription from people who found it useful. That approach has provided him a steady income stream to continue his work (all for the site hosting and purchase of reference works, he doesn't take any pay himself) , and it's now up to more than 22,000 species. (That is pretty amazing, since there are only 25000-30000 orchid species in the world, most of them are documented on the site!)
So this has grown bit by bit over the years, with the effort going into building the content, not the interface. There is an incredible amount of content there, all maintained (and added to) by volunteer effort. To update the "look" would be a monumental task... as far as I know, nobody has volunteered to to it.
A note when you use the site... the icons are not very accurate with regard to temperature. Read the content, which will give you elevation information which translates to temperature ranges which ARE accurate, based upon the references (which are well documented for each species)