I am a teacher in Brisbane which is the capital of Queensland in Australia. I was teaching a class of Year 5 students and one of our topics for Science was life cycles. I decided to do the life cycle of spiders and the web page grew from there. You can see some of the early photos of the classes keeping redbacks (which they never handled) in the classroom and observing their life cycle and more importantly, learning to respect spiders and NOT kill them just because they are spiders!!
As I was also learning how to do web sites - self taught - I decided to put the photos on a web site and the kids did some research into different types of spiders. I put their projects online as well and the site started to grow.
Eventually, people started sending me photos of spiders to identify and I started to broaden my knowledge of the different species and included them on the web site.
Today the site takes a lot of time and effort to answer everyone's emails, to try to help people with spider problems and identify spiders but its well worth it when I can help someone!!
glen