I began work on a site whose working title was "Melissa's Interactive Beatles Page" in July 1996. After a while I learned more about web design and my work on other sites motivated me to get my Beatles site to a state I was pleased with. It officially opened in February, 1997, when I added it to Yahoo! and Dave Haber's links. I feel it's time now that I reflect on some of my thoughts in designing this page which might help you understand it better.
First off, I have attempted to be as original as possible in designing this site in terms of content, if not design as well. That's why you will not find lyrics, a discography, biographies of the individual Fabs, and most definitely, you will never ever see a Paul Is Dead page here. Dave Haber handled most of this when he put up his site (I'm guessing it was close to three years ago judging by when I first saw it, though I'm probably wrong). If you feel a need to duplicate the information that is already out there and pass it off as being something incredible, be my guest. I don't have much respect for your site though. This site is in no way a "complete site" by a lot of people's definitions. If you know nothing about the Beatles, this is not the right page for you, however you also probably wouldn't have found it if it wasn't for you.
I also do not have an award that I give out. For those of you who visited my site a while ago, you might have noticed a "Beatles Site of the Day". I canned that idea almost immediately because I realized it violated my goals in creating the page. People with awards are basically designing a nice graphic and by "awarding" it to people, they are basically offering them a cute way to put on the awardee's page a link to their page. If you offer me an award, I will include it on my links page, because I view it as a link exchange. I have nominated my site for awards, just as I have asked a few sites to link to mine. But I have no intention of creating an advertisement for my site and passing it off as an award. You will also never need to scroll through twenty awards on my page. Nothing is more annoying than this. The same thing goes for webrings. I truly have no respect for people who create additional Beatles webrings. There was one that was created a while ago (I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was a long time ago) and that is all that is needed. Why confuse the matter by joining a million rings and also causing your site's visitors to have to scroll through a ton of stupid graphics. It is pointless. I agree with the idea of rings for the individual Beatles (and have included HariOnTour in the George ring) because there is a significant difference between Beatles and solo Beatles, but adamantly refuse to join any other rings.
On the same line, I also do not have an "add-a-link" page although I have a copy of Matt Wright's script on my site. I want to take a look at the sites that I link to and I also do not want this to be a link-oriented site. Yahoo! and Dave Haber have linked to virtually all the fan sites and if you are interested in merchandise, most of those sites will appear first in other websearches. Sites that focus almost entirely on links could not be anymore useless.
As a design note, I am a very strong opponent of frames. I am guessing that most of the people who use frames are unfamiliar with tables and probably assume that their visitors will be impressed with their amazing HTML ability (when in fact, frames are quite simple to code). Tables can accomplish everything that frames can (you want a navigation bar?) and even more in that they can help clean up your layout (so that people don't need to scroll down for ten hours like on most Beatles sites). They have the added advantage that they won't lead to the eventual frustration of your visitors. I've never been to a site that uses frames that hasn't gotten gotten me into some problem almost immediately. The only pages on this site that use frames are the discussion boards, where I can actually see some valid argument for frames.
Finally, I think Beatles sites are rare among fan sites in the amount of copyrighted material that is out there. I certainly have not obeyed every copyright law, though I have tried to include copyright notices where applicable. Despite the shutdown of two sites (who re-opened with success though slightly less content), the Beatles' people have been very tolerant. There is a part of me, however, that wishes they would be a little less tolerant. The reason for this is that I feel that Beatles webmasters are very competitive with each other. They form friendships with visitors to their sites, but I think it is rare that webmasters form good friendships with other webmasters. I think most of us want our sites to be successful, for whatever reason, and see the proliferation of other sites as slightly threatening. I must admit that I enjoyed Beatles websurfing a lot more before I designed my own site, though I have had equally as much fun designing my site. In a way, some regulation might be good to make the sites less competitive and also encourage more people to make sites.