Launching a directory: the first few testers and visitors
View all blog posts about this local web directory.
Background: I’ve been working on a local Devon business directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.
2 - 11 September, 2007:
2/9 Phoned my mother and brother and asked them to add listings. Of course, my mother’s registration email doesn’t arrive. I check and can’t see anything wrong, so to my shame, I assume the problem is something to do with her relatively new email setup, which seems to have problems with spam filtering. I create her membership and she adds a basic listing for a local charity, the Adventure Trust for Girls - thanks mum!
3/9 Emailed 2 friends, 2 former potential customers, a classmate from my business startup programme and also a local woman whose children’s activities I’d been taking the kids to. I offer them every feature free if they’ll help by adding a listing to test it out. They mostly say ‘That email was so long, I’ll read it later’. Nobody adds anything 
Added a link in ‘UnitedKingdomDirectory.com‘
4/9 Added site to ‘Homerweb Search‘
6/9 Added site to Haabaa UK Directory and Scrub the Web search
7/9 Set up free listings and assigned usernames to my customers, transferred their listings to them and emailed them. Wrote about the site in my blog post ‘Stairway to Devon: I launch a Web Directory’.
10/9 I posted links in the ‘It is working’ topic on the perForms user group forum and the ‘Post your SOBI2 working site Here!’ topic in the SigSiu Net Sobi2 forum. Almost immediately I started getting visitors from all over the world. Next I submitted it for review in Hedir directory, somewhat nervously as people there review with varying levels of thoroughness.
11/9 I ask my employer to add a listing. His registration email doesn’t arrive. He put a typo in the email address. I discover my first new half-registration has also arrived, and done the same thing. I email (spelled correctly!) to ask her to try again, or send the stuff to me, but no response. I do much testing on the email registrations, adding SPF and changing from PHP mail to SMTP. My mother is now able to register a new username - so this is what I should have done a week ago.
Comments:
The most important lessons I learned this week?
- NEVER assume a problem is caused by something on the client side (ie user’s email program, human error etc).
- Most people will not get round to helping you out.
As I commented in my last post, ‘How I launched my web directory and started promoting it’,
Without paying for testing, you are in a difficult situation: your earliest visitors are more like guinea pigs than they may realise, and they are unlikely to tell you if anything went wrong unless they are charged for it. I had to figure out many of the early problems using web statistics, and found the visitor tracking provided by my javascript statistics from Statcounter, were the only clues I had to how people used the site and why certain things were going wrong.
When submitting to other directories, I have found many that do not work properly. The worst culprits are those that use automated tools to check for reciprocal links, which do not seem able to follow the search engine friendly (SEF) URLs generated by Joomla’s SEF plugins (OpenSEF in my case). A couple of times, I was offered the chance to email the site if this happened, but mostly I just had to write that time off.
View all blog posts about launching this local web directory.