Launching a Local Directory

How I launched my local directory website and started promoting it
(The first few months of my website, warts and all)

I kept a diary while launching a Devon business directory / community website. It’s serialised in this category of posts.

Re-reading some of the posts, I wonder if the topic should be ‘Why I launched my local directory website and started promoting it’! It’s certainly jumping in at the deep end to be launching your first Joomla site to the people all around you, and I regretted doing that at times, when I had less local projects planned as well. But in fact it has been a fantastic learning experience.

I’d been experimenting with Joomla and Drupal, and wanted to get more in-depth practice and experience with Joomla. I also wanted to be able to offer my customers (and my own business!) a preferential service with more locally relevant advertising. And I wanted a site for trying out various advertising and marketing strategies. So the local directory website seemed a great plan for meeting several goals at once.

The first post in the series is this one: ‘I launch a local web directory’. Notice how quickly I stopped expecting it to make money - hopefully there’s a time for that later on!