(Launching a new web directory, continued from previous posts)
This was the worst period so far, encompassing more trouble with rival sites, face to face sales, dynamic content causing unexpected layout breakages, and unexpected reserves of grim determination…
During this early period I was focusing almost obsessively on how the first few individual users were interacting with the site: so many issues were raised in this early stage, some which could be fixed whenever I got the time, and others which still require more radical reorganisation 6 months later.
I continued advertising, watching the stats, working on the site, and most of all trying to be in contact with people so that I could find out how the site was working and prevent potential members going astray…
Background: I’ve been launching and promoting Stairway to Devon, a Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.
Click this link to view all 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. Emailed North Devon Arts, which keeps bouncing my email back. Emailed:
Music Events
Devon Earth Building Association
Flaxey Green (folk music network)
Exmoor Border Morris
Joined Plymouth Freecycle
Someone else registers and the listing doesn’t arrive. What on earth is going on 
Friend John is going to try it this weekend though - hopefully he will figure it out.
Bad news - eventually discover a new bug that has stopped the ‘Send’ button working in the Add Entry form in Internet Explorer. Eventually fixed it. Very annoyed. How many listings (and how much of my reputation) have I lost through this? Must do more Internet Explorer testing.
While I’m working on the form, I try again to make it more user friendly.
22/9
Emailed Plymouth Freecycle. Mail bounces back. Posted again through their website.
I make more usability improvements to the form, rewording things, grouping things together and best of all adding some javascript to hide the non-working map from Internet Explorer users - they now have a link to my working map in a new window instead.
Message comes back: Plymouth freecycle moderator did not approve my posting Feel a moment of despair till I notice she has suggested posting it to their ‘cafe’ group instead. So I join the cafe group and post it there instead. Fingers crossed that it will go through this time. It’s a much smaller group but hopefully might have some keen environmentalists wanting to advertise something.
Post goes through to cafe group. I email Plymouth group moderator saying thanks for pointing me in the right direction and would it be ok to add a listing for Plymouth freecycle groups as I’m keen to get more green listings in. Spam protector bounces it back but I register with it, message gets through and she agrees. I add listings for Plymouth Freecycle and Plymouth Freecycle Cafe groups. Become resigned to having to add most of the early listings myself.
I receive a positive reply from Trevor from Flaxey Green folk music network - great! Added his listing and sent him the link (hope he likes it!).
Joined Recycle South Devon Group and sent them a message. Just checked their website - the group doesn’t seem very active and has a lot of unrelated spam postings - still at least that makes mine look more respectable!
I see a posting on Recycle South Devon from someone who was organising an art festival in Plymouth. So I email her, just on the offchance.
Emailed the person who was trying to register when the Send button wasn’t working. Apologised and offered to add the listing and transfer it over to her.
Emailed someone from Exeter Freecycle who set up a recycling website a while ago, asking to exchange links.
23/9 Started off well - I switched on the computer to find someone new had registered and added a listing for jewellery making classes in Cornwall (well it’s near enough!). I published them and emailed her suggesting it could go in a couple more categories and she said yes please and also added a listing for card making and a news item. Then I ran into a slight hitch: after publishing her news item I discovered I couldn’t transfer the ownership of it to her. Posted a query on Joomla forum, hope this will not be a problem.
Then came some bad news - angry email arrived from Trevor from Flaxey Green. Because I’d added his listing myself, I hadn’t expected the system to send him a payment email. But it did, so he was angry, thinking I’d offered him something free and then charged him for it and asking me to remove it because he had no intention of paying. Felt terrible. Emailed straight away with an explanation / apology saying definitely no charge, automatic email, didn’t expect it to go to him, sorry for misunderstanding, etc. Checked the email and it said Error on it and had an extra paid gallery as well. Posted panic stricken help message to Sigsiu forums (for the directory). Then realised I’d got the emails mixed up - he’d got the right info but just shouldn’t have got it at all. Posted apology to Sigsiu forums. Emailed another apology to Trevor offering free stuff to make up for the annoyance and asking to keep the listing in. Terrible PR all round - hope he doesn’t still want me to remove it.
Emailed Exeter freecycle group owner asking if I could add a listing for them as I’m keen to get more green listings in. Allyn doesn’t think I should email the freecycle group again though. Some of them probably didn’t see it last time, but a repeat posting might annoy more of them.
As my friend Dawn said, I’m not having much luck asking people to test things or put entries in, because it’s asking people to do things when it’s something they haven’t heard of. Offering free stuff just seems to make them suspicious. So I realised I have to raise the profile of the site - at this stage I don’t necessarily even expect listings to result from my adverts (though I hope some will), it’s more a matter of just getting the site’s name out there. Thankfully, Stairway to Devon is a memorable name!
(23 September promotional work is continued in the next post)
Click this link to view all posts about launching the ‘Stairway to Devon’ directory
Comments
Link Building: a total nightmare
Of all the promotional activities I’ve tried in launching the directory, ‘link building’ is the most unpleasant by far. During the last 6 months, as a rough estimate I’ve probably emailed about 20 - 30 website owners, individually, with carefully thought out emails tailored to the subject of their websites and how we might benefit each other (ie not mass mailings in any sense), and only about 3 have even replied.
This kind of minimal response makes email for link building a massive waste of time, and you need a very thick skin for it too or a couple of weeks of this can really get your spirits down (at least if it’s your own site: I guess if you’re doing link building for someone else you might not care as much).
For a more well established site, I’d guess ‘link building’ by email might be more productive, due to the increased name recognition and page rank the site can offer in any kind of partnership.
For new sites, I wouldn’t bother doing this again. Instead, on the next site I’ll try adding links between content items and waiting to see if they are ever reciprocated. People do check their back links and referring sites, and by the time enough of them do, a website might be well established enough for them to consider linking back to. The unpleasantness of link building is another excellent reason why I will launch any future directories with data from DMOZ.
Joomla Access Groups and Content Authoring
I discovered that simple registered users are not entitled to add content items to a Joomla site. There are a couple of ways around this (including Joomla extension components): the one I discovered this time was to add a line of code to the gacl.class.php file.
Javascript conflicts
Javascript conflicts are very likely on a Joomla site, as you can have many extensions installed that are written by different programmers. I’ve tended to find that any Javascript conflict can result in important functions just not working in Internet Explorer, while Firefox will happily continue as if everything is fine. Therefore, regular Internet Explorer testing is unfortunately necessary.
Cookies and Community Builder
Although the cookie problem can be (kind of) worked around, I am still not pleased about it. I’m planning a major overhaul of the Stairway to Devon website in a few months’ time, and one of the changes will be an exit from Community Builder. Stairway to Devon is not a ‘community’ site as such, and developments in SOBI 2 and other components I’ve found since then have made Community Builder an unnecessary extension for this site.
Usability
Usability, in particular for the ‘Add Entry’ form, remains a major concern with this site, and will be the key focus of the upcoming major overhaul. As I’m doing an OU course in ‘Fundamentals of Interaction Design’, that should provide a useful framework for usability improvements.
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.
16 - 20 September 2007
16/9 Ordered more free business cards from , some free fridge magnets (same as the business cards), and Post-Its. The redesign of the postcards can wait till I’ve used up the first batch.
Added a link from my family homepage.
Posted a few posts around the Hedir forums and reviewed some websites for them.
Updated my Google Sitemap.
Pleased to see that someone has been looking at my e-cards from Iran!
17/9 I registered in Duport directory for business startups (listing never appeared), Add URL free (not sure), and an advertising directory (which has been a good one).
Left a couple of posts on the Plymouth network in Facebook - unrelated to the subject but if anyone looked me up, the link would be there. Noticed the Facebook marketplace - will check that out when I next have time.
Felt very strung out - hate the feeling of advertising to the people around me!
I left some business cards and postcards on display in the Exeter Arts Centre (as it’s an arts focused web directory) - I’d been nervous after some of the previous shops refusing to display them but it was no problem at all.
18/9 Started getting junk mail to my new domain address, although I’ve used a hotmail address for most of the add link things (once I remembered to). But mostly they have been quite relevant - thanks to one of them today I added a link to SearchNewz.com directory.
Gave my mother a few postcards and business cards for displaying in Budleigh, where she has a hair appointment (and thanks again mum!).
Posted to perForums forum again, saying how pleased I was with being able to use their component to create accessible alternative forms for the website.
I discover some photo files are even bigger than I had adjusted for the second time round. Changed the file upload limits again, and continued with the accessibility / usability improvements to various forms.
Emailed a link building company in Plymouth who had been asking me to refer customers to them, and asked them to include my directory among their link building resources. I checked my web statistics to see what I could tell them, and was impressed to find I’d had 392 unique visitors this week.
Added a message in my Facebook status line asking for testers to put Devon based listings in my site.
Oh no - Checked my web stats - DMOZ editors have just visited. Didn’t expect them for months - I only put the listing in a couple of days ago. Yikes.
This is what they looked at:
18th September 2007 16:13:05 editors.dmoz.org/editors/editunrev.cgi?site=2140108&cat=Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Devon/Guides_and_Directories&chainsaw=1
www.stairway-to-devon.co.uk/
18th September 2007 16:13:47 www.stairway-to-devon.co.uk/
www.stairway-to-devon.co.uk/devon-web-directory/arts-and-entertainment/
18th September 2007 16:14:17 editors.dmoz.org/editors/editunrev.cgi?site=2140108&cat=Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Devon/Guides_and_Directories&chainsaw=1
www.stairway-to-devon.co.uk/
Not much then, 2 pages. I can’t think that’s a good sign. Oh dear. Also worrying that they seem to come from the same ISP as me. And what’s this ‘chainsaw’ in the URL??
Installed a statistics program to add a little widget to my site showing my visitors from different countries, as they make an impressively long list already - hopefully this should encourage people to join and get their stuff seen.
22:14 I’M IN DMOZ!!!! That makes me feel a WHOLE lot better! Thanks, Dmoz editor! Here’s my Stairway to Devon DMOZ listing.
19/9: Gave my mother a business card for the Music with Mummy teacher, who I know has several home businesses. (fingers crossed, thanks again Mum!)
A new member from my husband’s work signs up and enters a listing, just like that! Hopefully this means all my usability improvements are paying off.
Ordered 2 T-shirts from . The first one was free but with postage they still ended up costing nearly 10 pounds. One is for my husband to wear, as he often takes the kids out and about while I’m working at the weekends. The other is (hopefully) for my friend Dawn to wear, as she travels a lot around Devon, meeting conservation and wildlife groups. If not, I expect my dad would wear it, which would be good as he knows so many local people who are always stopping him to chat. They are quite nice T shirts - I’d wear one myself if I ever left the house!
Another piece of good luck today: I had a call to do a small B and B website for a new customer. Great news for me, and from the directory point of view, I got to add another listing, and make the most of all its features on behalf of my new customer.
20/9 Nightmare: discovered two fairly serious problems with the website just as I’m about to spend the whole day with my toddler son. I try to fit them in around each other.
The first issue is that the interactive maps aren’t working properly in Internet Explorer. I traced it to a Javascript conflict with the particular template I am using, but have not yet narrowed it down beyond that - presumably there must be some included files somewhere. However, I did find a way around it within a day by using the Joomla ‘wrapper’ feature. It’s not ideal, because search engines won’t index it, but it’s a big improvement.
The second problem relates to the registration and login component Community Builder. I discovered that when members registered in Firefox on one computer they were not able to login using Internet Explorer 6 on a different computer. I’ve been posting this on their notice boards.
Internet Explorer has not been popular with me today.
Went into town today and saw my postcard has gone up in the newsagent’s window. Felt terrible at the time, with the maps looking so rubbish, but now they’re fixed, hopefully it will be a good thing.
Somebody registered this evening and set up a new entry - good progress, hope it continues.
Publicised Dmoz listing on the website as it might persuade more people to sign up.
Comments:
Getting into DMOZ (the Open Directory) was a fantastic piece of luck. As well as being a sign of quality (so they say), a listing in Dmoz is taken more seriously than many other links by Google and other search engines, making Stairway to Devon’s pages more likely to be found in internet searches. Google also uses Dmoz data in it’s own directory, as do hundreds of smaller search engines.
When adding the site to other directories later, I found a link to this profile for my local DMoz editor:
Profile
My interests include the county of Devon, Dartmoor, horticulture and the crafts scene in the south-west of England. … I have no ties with any other directory organization or scheme that uses ODP data.
So I guess it might have helped that the focus of the site was in line with his interests.
During these few days, I combined many different promotional tactics to get my directory noticed, including submitting to directories, posting to forums and social networking sites, business card and postcard advertising, word of mouth, emailing link building requests, and planning for future advertising using T shirts.
As a naturally shy person, I’ve found a lot of this promotional activity very unnerving, but in each case, I’ve become much bolder after the first few attempts. So once I’ve got into the right frame of mind I quite enjoy going into shops and meeting people now. On the other hand, I’ve found it stressful to be advertising to people around me and have spent a lot more time avoiding them too, staying in more, using back streets, wearing dark glasses, etc (sounds funny I know!).
In between the frenetic promotional activity, the site continued to go through teething troubles with its first users, requiring continually vigilant monitoring and urgent technical fixes - also very stressful when I had little time and other things I needed to do.
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.
Click to view all Stairway to Devon posts
Click to view all Stairway to Devon posts
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.
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?
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.
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