Is there any money left?

Background: I’ve been working on Stairway to Devon, a Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.

12-15th September, 2007

12/9 I add a link to my profile in Facebook and my email signatures in Gmail and on the Open University forums (where I’m a student). (I had to install a Firefox extension called Better Gmail to get HTML in my Gmail signature). First review of my site is posted on Hedir (a peer reviewed website directory) - thankfully a good one.

I post to my blog again, all about how I made the web directory. The blog is set to ping various blog search sites like Technorati - haven’t really checked this out yet but I do occasionally get a visitor from there.

13/9 Business cards and postcards arrive from . Now I’ve got them, I don’t think my postcard designs are very good - the text needs breaking up into a bulleted list at least. But I like the business cards a lot. I start giving business cards to people I know, and ask toddler group if they could display them on their noticeboard. I thought they would because another card has been up for a while, but they say they’ll have to ask the church elders as it’s their hall and run by church volunteers.

As a nasty shock I see a flyer in my local shop announcing that someone else is launching a local directory / community site at the same time. This is the second time in a row that this has happened to one of my projects. I wasn’t intending to put cards in shops yet but because of this I start going to a few relevant shops, offering lots of people free stuff, and paying shops with paid advertising slots to display them. I’m disappointed by how many shops I’d thought were relevant won’t put the cards up, but at least the lady who runs the gallery seems positive about it.

I ask my husband to post a notice on his bulletin board system at work, offering people from there free stuff till the end of the month.

I phone Angela Lowe, the advisor from my women’s business programme at Westward Training in Exeter, and she offers to send out 50 business cards to her clients. So I post her those.

I phone my friend Dawn, saying ‘Please do the listing…’ and she does it while on the phone (thanks Dawn!) and starts thinking of other people to get involved. Then I phone my brother with the same thing (thanks Stig).

Ask my parents to put up a postcard in their village post office (thanks again!)

I add a link to my signature on Hedir (web design related forums) which should instantly give me a couple of hundred links! Signature links don’t appear. I eventually figure out the html tags were stopping it from working and it needs to use BB Code, so I look that up and fix it. Now it works.

14/9 2 people from my husband’s work register and I get my first listing from someone I don’t know!

Another friend who I’d phoned earlier comes to visit and ‘agrees’ to enter her listing while she is here (thanks Lee!). I’m learning a lot from seeing and hearing how people use the site.

Since the site is a local directory, I join the local (Plymouth) network in Facebook so they can see the link if they look at my profile.

I post the site in Community Builder Site Showcase, and then add a listing to another directory I found in there, Joomlapoweredsites.com (These relate to software and components I used in constructing the website).

15/9 As it’s an environment related site, I post to my local freecycle email group, again offering free stuff before the end of the month. Several people registered and I got one more listing, who also added a reciprocal link in exchange for a little flag icon on his listing - Hooray!

I soon discover the entry form isn’t always working, and track this down (I hope) to a PHP memory limitation which I’ve now fixed. It turns out real people upload massive photos without resizing them or saving them for the web or anything. Who knew! In the meantime I’ve lost 3 listings

Also a blind lady emails me to say she couldn’t use the CAPTCHA security code, so I register her (as offered on the site) and begin lots of work on accessibility. I also figure out that one of the visitors was having problems with Javascript disabled (loads more work!) Felt very embarrassed to have launched a site without enough accessibility - I guess I didn’t expect it to come up so soon.

Submitted some scary listings today - DMoz (the selective and human reviewed Open Directory, whose data is used by many other directories and search engines), and the Joomla Community Forums Site Showcase.

The first review on Joomla forums is not very positive - they don’t like my use of the standard template and think I have too many menu options and the site’s purpose is not clear enough. So I cut out three of the menu options and start working on more user friendliness, rewriting and rearranging sections of the site to make it clearer. I’m not prepared to change the template at this stage though - too much extra complication while everything else is still settling in.

Got an email from Linked In, which prompted me to log in and add a link to my user profile there.

Finally I ask my brother to add a link from his online photo album, in the hopes it might bring in the occasional old friend of his that still lives here.

Comments:

This week was extremely busy, and an excellent learning experience.

The problems that arose:

Firstly, it brought home the difficulty for a directory in getting not only a critical mass, but getting the first few listings at all. I had already entered listings for about 30 important local information sites, so I don’t know if the problem is more that people don’t want to be one of the only ones there, or if they just can’t be bothered to put the time into something that isn’t already successful.

The second key points are the importance of accessibility and usability. Neither of these can be ignored: accessibility problems can completely block out a small number of people, whereas usability difficulties can be just enough to put off a larger number of people. With all the education and training I’ve done in these fields, I really should have known better: I just thought I had more time.

Solutions:
Although I was able to get a few listings in by ringing round, begging friends and relatives, talking them through it and frogmarching people to the computer, this is obviously not ideal. I soon realised that a new directory either has to be much simpler to use, or start off with a large enough number of listings to make people who find it want to be in it. I eventually opted for the solution of entering listings with data from DMOZ, which you’re allowed to do as long as you include their standard table of links back to them on every page that uses their data. With hindsight, and in setting up new directories, I would definitely do this from the start.

Advertising: so what worked and what didn’t?

The cheapest options are obviously those using word of mouth.

Phoning individuals and begging worked in a few cases, and also led to a couple more listings by word of mouth, but also runs the risk of giving an early impression of failure.

The small business advisor was very helpful, but I don’t think any new members or listings appeared as a result (surprising, as I’d have thought self employed startups would be among those who would benefit most from a free locally relevant internet space).

The workplace bulletin board was free and comparatively successful, bringing in several new members and a couple of listings.

Facebook, LinkedIn etc: So far these have brought in a couple of visits from my friends and that’s it, however, I haven’t used them to their full advantage yet.

Forum links continued to be successful in bringing in traffic (which is good for the all important statistics for a directory), but most of it from people interested in the technical set up rather than adding any content.

Email signature links: I do see the occasional visitor coming from an email program. I can’t tell whether it is from my email signature or from other people emailing URLs to each other.

The business cards and postcards from seem to have brought in some of the early listings (see later posts for more details, but I’d say in general pinboards and locations carefully targeted for social groups and interests were cheaper (often free) and more effective than newsagents’ windows). However, one of the key items with the postcard advertising, rather than bringing in listings, is to get the site’s name appearing out there and building local recognition.

However, the surprise success story of this week was my local Freecycle email group. I saw a massive increase in visitors after posting here, and although some were almost certainly web designers / developers checking it out, many would be self-employed, or club members with arts or environment related interests. I discovered later on that this mailing list has a circulation of 7000,

So I guess the ideal arrangement would have been to get the usability, accessibility, testing etc perfect, set up some carefully targeted postcard and business card advertising and then post it with special offers to a relevant mailing list like Freecycle.

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