13 April 2016

20 years of Hoefnet; from farriers list to up-to-date driving website

In May 2016 Hoefnet,the world's most current and prominent news and results site in the field of driving, will celebrate its 20th anniversary. When owner Cindy Timmer set up the site with her then partner, blacksmith Rick Velstra, she could not have imagined how popular Hoefnet would become and what role the website would have in the driving sport two decades later.

The idea of developing their own website began when Rick wanted to publish an online directory of addresses and telephone numbers for all of the farriers associated with the Dutch Farrier Association. Rick was already interested in the world of ICT and internet – with the combination of ‘hoefsmid’ and ‘internet’ the name ‘Hoefnet’ and the website was born.

As both founders were active in the equestrian sport it wasn’t long before the directory was spruced up with an event and competition calendar, as well as a ‘bulletin board’ with advertisements, a links page, and regularly a small contest was organized. With the eye on the future, an English version of the website was ambitiously added on!

From the very early stages, Hoefnet worked closely with scoring specialist Philippe Liйnart. Liйnart was responsible for getting all of the latest competition results per fax and later per email onto Cindy’s desk. “In the beginning we had to re-type all of the results from the dressage, eventing and driving competitions over onto the Hoefnet website. We didn’t write any of our own news articles at that point, those messages were copied directly over from magazines such as Hoefslag! Copyright? We didn’t even think about it!” tells Cindy. And Hoefnet was born… Cindy looked after the editorial aspects of the website and Rick looked after the technical side.

At the end of the 90’s Cindy and Rick made the decision to have Hoefnet focus exclusively on combined driving. As the internet changed so did they, updating logos, the bulletin board became “Hoefjes” and a help wanted page was added. In 2008, Hoefnet made the step over to iWink, an web design company that updated the format of the website, among other things. The branding that you currently see on Hoefnet dates from 2010. That was also the year that the German version was added to the site, which is managed by the Dutch single driver Frans Hellegers, who lives in Germany.

The carriage driving bug also infected Cindy’s father Ad Timmer. By filming the competitions where his daughter was grooming, a new hobby was born. Soon every show where Cindy went, first as groom and later as organizer, her parents also followed to film and for the fun. With the creation of Hoefnet, Ad began filming digitally, and educated himself on editing and how to set the films online. One of the last films he made was in February 2014, at the Four-in-hand World Cup in Bordeaux. He past away in July of that year and in 2015 Cindy lost her mother as well.

In 2014, after the passing of her father Cindy went through a difficult period: Hoefnet was forever tied to the memory of her father, who was so dedicated to the sport and the website. After talking with various potential business partners, she decided that letting Hoefnet out of her own hands also wasn’t the answer. Hoefnet is a 24 hour per day, 7 day a week job and to do that and still attend to her other responsibilities within the driving sport a team had to be built to relieve some of the pressure. “My motto is: you do it well or you don’t do it at all”, tells Cindy. “To keep up with all of the news and results, also in the evenings and weekends it is just not possible to do by myself.”

The team around Cindy now consists of Kelly Houtappels-Bruder who looks after the English version of the site; Krisztina Horvбth, Cindy’s right-hand girl and manager of the Hungarian version; Frans Hellegers, Katharina Meyer Jьres and Rudolf Temporini for German Hoefnet; Mariska Thijsen who looks after marketing; Gemma Verlaan who not only gives editorial support but also contributes video, and the Nederlandse rekenkamer who makes sure that all of the results are sent directly to Hoefnet. In addition, a partnership has been formed with Frank Houtappels from We/Provide, a change Hoefnet followers will definitely notice in the coming months.

The question remains what the future holds for Hoefnet: “Ideally I would love to have a Cindy in every country with a large driving community who is just as fanatic about combined driving as I am here, but they are hard to find,” she laughs. “ So we have decided that Hoefnet is good as it is, but that here and there we can still make improvements and we are working hard on that every day!”