Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Web 2.0 Devon business directory.
I threw myself in at the deep end with this: it was my first completed Joomla / Web 2.0 site and had a budget of practically zero (I practised things on it for work!). It was also my first experience of doing my own sales and marketing, and worst of all, being local, it was all aimed at people around me… a kind of motivational experience which could best be descirbed as ‘bracing’. Those people on the Apprentice may look like idiots at times, but I have some sympathy!
I kept a diary at the time, and this is a kind of blog with hindsight, after all, there were so many ‘learning experiences’ involved…
This post covers the period when its Google PageRank went from ‘unranked’ to (drumroll…) zero. Yikes.
Click this link to view all posts about launching the directory
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Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Web 2.0 Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings. Things had been through a stressful and stormy patch, but I think these few days in the diary mark a turning point, during which my attitude changed and became tougher.
View all blog posts about launching a local web directory.
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Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Devon business directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.
View all blog posts about launching the directory.
21 – 23 September 2007
21/9 Continuing testing / correspondence with Joomlapolis forum people about the Community Builder login problems. I find out there is a particular browser setting to accept cookies that is required for login to work. I’m not pleased that people might have to adjust their browser settings to log in, but at least know I know there’s a fix I can tell them about it. I add a help file and a link to it from the login box.
Started looking through the Devon Arts section of Dmoz for likely looking websites to approach for a link swap.
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Background: I’ve been working on 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.
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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 
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It took a village to make this (Devon directory) and it took me several months to complete it.*
I’d been experimenting with Joomla! and Drupal, and one of the first things I found was that Joomla! has several options for purpose built business directory extensions, and Drupal doesn’t have any (at least it didn’t at the time). Joomla also seemed a lot more user friendly. So I went for Joomla.
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