Where "The Mustang Works™" came to
life while Dan McClain was in College | The Mustang Works™ started out as many other web sites did on the Internet, as someone's personal home page. In this case, it was a small web page about the various interests of Dan McClain, at the time a twenty four year old native of Flint, Michigan, working on his Computer Science degree. And, as a personal homepage the site was initially created in early-to-mid 1995. One of Mr. McClain's biggest interests, besides computers and programming (which he started with at the age of eight) was Ford Mustangs. By the time he launched his original home page in 1995, he had already owned three previous Mustangs and was now the proud owner of his fourth, a 1991 Mustang GT. So, as Mr. McClain puts it:
Mr. McClain's 1991 Mustang GT, dubbed the "Death Machine" is now highly modified. It features a race prepped, 750+ HP, Supercharged 377 cid 5.8L stroker engine capable of 9-second ET's. Still in full street trim, and weighing 3550 lbs, it is street driven thousands of miles each year. It's no trailer queen. | "I just love Mustangs, especially my 91' GT. I had purchased the car in 1991 near Lexington, Kentucky where I lived at the time. I had already owned 3 others, and I had worked on and raced them all. I never found the one I quite wanted though. A red one with black interior. Finally, I sold my black 1991 Mustang GT and bought this one. It was everything I had wanted. And well, you know, it stayed stock for about a week. Quickly I had lowered the car, installed a complete Flowmaster exhaust system, and installed a Nitrous kit. I had the car running 12.6 in the quarter mile within a month on eight inch slicks. Being into computers for a long time, and just getting into the world of the Internet, it didn't take me long to quickly learn all these amazing new online technologies. I started my small home page about my hobbies like a lot of folks, and of course, I had my Mustang on it along with some tech info and links. Already having a knack for this stuff and wanting to further advance my newly learned skills, I just kept at it. And, at it, and at it, and... Wow, now look at where it's at! Today it [MustangWorks.com™] is just huge. The site now has thousands of pages, a slew of custom features, tens of thousands visit, and readers generate millions of page views each month. The thing is, back in 1995 was when every one was just starting to discover the Internet and get online. Especially Mustang performance and racing enthusiasts. So, I thought hey, there's not really any big place on the web for these people to meet up and communicate. Or, to get tips and tech advice. I had learned a good deal about modifying late model Mustangs and I thought I could help people from not making some of the mistakes I did. Therefore, I guess my goal at the time was to build a web site on the Internet that could become an epicenter for us to communicate." 
Dan McClain, Founder of MustangWorks.com™
and President of Aero3 Media. | 
MustangWorks.com™ operates on an in-house enterprise level, hardware load balanced web farm comprised of 18 Dell, IBM, and custom built servers that communicate on a gigabit network with multiple backbone connections to the Internet. |
And, that he did. When the site started as his home page, it attracted about five hundred hits a week right off the bat. As Mr. McClain worked on it, making it bigger each week it seemed, the number of page views grew exponentially. One thousand a week, five thousand a week, ten thousand a week, etc. A few months after the site was started, Mr. McClain changed its homepage name to "The Mustang Works™", and totally concentrated on making it a Mustang information site. A year after it was started, in 1996, The Mustang Works™ was already garnering fifty thousand page views a month. Today, MustangWorks.com™ has been one of the largest Ford enthusaist and community sites for over twelve years. It lives on a full scale, load balanced web farm. MustangWorks.com™ continues to grow and today receives millions of page views each month. The site is still heavily geared towards the online Mustang enthusiast, which provides an excellent online information source and community for all who own and enjoy this American automotive performance icon. |
