Hidden In The Sand (Website)
Hidden In The Sand is the "Ultimate Tally Hall Fan Headquarters". Often abbreviated "HITS", it is a comprehensive fan site that is run independently by Coz Baldwin. The site has continually been a cornucopia of information for new fans who like Tally Hall but don't know where to start. The site often updates through its blog and a twitter account. It also contains the Tally Hallmanac, a fan-run wiki about the band.
History
Long ago, on March 10th, 2005, The Official Tally Hall LiveJournal was started by Coz. A few months later, Tally Hall's website opened up their forums for the first time. The LiveJournal was the place where Coz kept track of all the news in the blog, but also kept track of all the show dates, reviews, and other news articles about Tally Hall.
Meanwhile, the forums began to get popular and eventually people began to demand a fan site be created. Coz balked at the idea, claiming the LiveJournal was already the fan site. But it was obvious people wanted something more official. So Coz volunteered to build it.
From the beginning, it was built from the ideas of the fans. In fact, when deciding upon a name, it was Jennie Sadler who suggested "Hidden In The Sand" be the name.
The site officially launched on April 2nd, 2006 with a light blue body topped with a hand drawn beach scene, with blank-faced figures wearing multi-colored ties sticking out from the sand.
In the words of Coz,
"I didn't want this to be a typical fan site. I felt it was important that the content was fan-driven as much as possible. It's not a knock-off of the official site, like many fan sites are. It's quite literally the fan's site. The one-stop shop where you can get all the information you need in one place. If the content you want isn't there, the fan puts it there. From buddy icons, to avatars, to photos and videos. The FAQ was an original part of the site. It was intended to answer any questions people had and allow new ones to be added by the people using the site. This is a Grand Central Station of Tally Hall information."
The site is constantly evolving. Some ideas stick, some ideas don't. Reviews and articles were dropped due to the simple fact that Tally Hall's popularity grew. At the time, the mentions were few and far between so it was easy to keep them all together and there was necessity in doing so. Now you'll find pages upon pages of results when you search for Tally Hall. The LiveJournal community continues to exist but is rarely updated.
On April 23rd, 2007 Hidden In The Sand launched a YouTube page called HITSdotcom.[1] Which hosts an interview with Tally Hall
Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2006 (version 1)
Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2008 (version 2.0)
Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2009 (version 2.5)
Hiddeninthesand.com as it looked in 2013 (version 3.0)
Hiddeninthesand.com as it looks now (version 4.0)
Version 2.0
Hiddeninthesand.com underwent a major facelift and changed its look to a sand-colored body area topped with an actual photo of the band looking as if they're climbing on top of the page. The content stretched to the width of the browser window. The debut of the new design was on July 7th, 2008. With it, HITS also launched a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter page[2] and a Myspace page.
Version 2.5
It didn't take long for Coz to get sick of the design and re-worked it to have a fixed-width, fine-tune the graphics, and clean up the code to run much faster. The basic look of the site did not change, however, and it was given the version #2.5 when it launched on September 20th 2009. Along with the debut came a new IRC chatroom and The Tally Hallmanac.
Version 3
Despite a soft-launch in November 2012, the official unveiling of HITS 3.0 occurred on March 10th, 2013. While the blog section was the only one previously powered by Wordpress, this new iteration of HITS saw Wordpress take over the whole site. With it, a new FAQ system was put in place; one that is more efficient, require less maintenance, and just easier to navigate. HITS 3.0 uses responsive design so all screen sizes and window sizes will be able to handle the website. The content will adjust to you.
The logo also was slightly adjusted for the new site, from one with sand behind the "H" to one that's just solid blue with a drop-shadow from the "H".
Version 4
HITS v4 was announced on September 11th, 2016. The new design featured a larger masthead image and focused on rich media filling up the home page. There were no new additions or significant changes to the structure of the site, although the post category of "ミラクルミュージカル (Miracle Musical)" was changed to "Joe Hawley" in order to properly accommodate future releases from Joe that were not under the Miracle Musical moniker.
Note: During the year of 2016, the logo of HITS was adjusted from an "H" to a "10" in celebration of HITS' 10 years on the web. This was reflected in the masthead image and on social media accounts.
Recent times
Every April 1st, HITS is known to post updates that are in fact April Fool's pranks, such as the death of Henry Hume IV, a fictional character from Tally Hall's Internet Show[3]
On November 16, 2018 the Hidden In The Sand twitter account tweeted regarding a logo update[4]; the same day they tweeted an alternate version[5] and a poll to decide which one would be used as the twitter logo. [6].
The same day, Hidden In The Sand experienced some problems with it's database[7] however, as of December 2018, the site remains active[8]