My site went online on March 31, 2005. At the time, however, I had intended it only as a place to post some of my photographs of European animals, and therefore the name of my site was simply "Niko´s  Web repository of photographs" (see Fig. 1).
In 2006, I decided to make my site a little bit more useful by adding information about the species, e.g. facts about their distribution, biology and systematics. To reflect these changes, I also changed the name of the site to "Web repository of information about European animals" (Fig. 2). That name stuck for quite some time, but I changed the layout of the site from time to time, which led to a rich "diversity" of page styles. Because all these old pages have been entirely programmed in HTML, these old page styles have to be updated manually one by one, and this is also the reason why many "old" pages are still around on my site: I simply did not yet have the time to update these pages. Only the page style from the early years is not present anymore, as these pages have eventually been updated to any of the new styles.
In 2007, I decided to change the focus of my site and restrict it to the fauna of Germany. In addition, I had the feeling that my site needed a proper logo and a name, that should be easier to memorize than the previous overly long titles. The name was supposed to combine the initial idea to have a repository for images and information, with the new focus on the German fauna. After a long period of thinking about a new name and a visually attractive logo, I finally decided on "DEpository" and the two-part logo with mainly green colors (Fig. 3). The "DE" part of the name alludes to the international abbreviation of Germany, that is also used as its internet TLD. And the "pository" part directly derives from the repository nature of my site.
I used the name "DEpository" for my site from 2008 to 2016. During these years my site has grown slowly but steadily, and from the growing number of image requests and citations in blogs, wikis and scientific publications, I presume that my site has also been gaining users over the years. Renaming my site into "Zoographia Germaniae" was therefore not a step taken lightheartedly. Nevertheless I thought it necessary for two reasons. First, although I initially thought that the name "DEpository" conveys the purpose of my site quite well, I later realized that in fact it does not really reveal what the site is about. In particular, any reference to the fact that it is a collection of zoological information is not at all included in the name. Second, apart from the two uppercase letters at the beginning of the name, the name is a usual English word and therefore does not produce significant hits in internet search engines. This, however, is very important for the visibility of my site: if something cannot be found via internet search engines, then it does not really exist on the internet. Most search engines even ignore uppercase/lowercase and a search for "DEpository" therefore simply returns pages that contain the word "depository" of which there are a lot, of course (e.g. Google finds 57 million pages that contain the word and my site is not anywhere near the top of the search results).
The change of the name to "Zoographia Germaniae" makes the name of my site more specific and thus I hope it can be found more easily using internet search engines. A survey performed in 2016 before the launch of the new name for my site and using the two search engines Google and Bing did not return any search results for "Zoographia Germaniae", thus suggesting that the new name is indeed unique. In addition, the new name now conveys better the purpose of my site: In the 19th century, a "zoographia" was a book that attempted to collected all essential knowledge about the species of an area, and also tried to provide means for their identification, e.g. illustrations and detailed descriptions.