We've been live just about two weeks now and so far I've had a good deal of fun. We aren't making any money yet, nor did we really expect to at this point. Before we make money, we have to have a quality resource, and while I think we are moving in the right direction we simply aren't there yet.
The Good
Statistically, we are doing very good, again considering that there has been no promotion and the search engines haven't had too much of a chance to even know that we are around yet. We are averaging nearly 600 page views a day, and the majority of that is coming from anonymous traffic - not just our friends. (more like friends of friends that have been alerted to the site and some search engine visitors).We've had some visitors come in through netscape news and reddit and I've noticed a few inbound links already, so thanks for that.
I've had a good deal of fun writing the articles for the site, playing around with the layout, and working on the graphics. It certainly has increased my appreciation level for the DW.
The QuickSnips section is fun for me, and it seems to be getting some consistent page views. Eventually I want to invite user submissions, clean up the layout, and allow voting so that we can float the popular articles to the top. Because of the brevity of the articles, I've chosen to just output summary pages for now, but I may migrate them to individual pages while maintaining daily archives and the index page which is a complete listing of the last 10 quicksnips. I do have a bit of concern regarding duplicate content issues, which is why I'm not entirely too keen on individual pages, but as we grow and the quicksnips have the ability to generate some community responses those issues should go away.
The Bad
I'm disappointed in myself for not getting the site to the point of promotion this far into things. I'd hate for the messageboard to die down due to the lack of new members and variety of subject matter. I would like to put the site in front of a couple hundred thousand people within the next 30 days, but I won't spend the money on promotion until I'm comfortable that we are able to retain a small percentage of those visitors. Picking up 100,000 visitors in any given day is nice (and I have several proven methods for bringing those kinds of numbers in), but it is a worthless and expensive venture (in time, energy, and money) if we can't convert some of those people into regular repeat visitors. I have a few goals for getting to that point:- Recent Blog Headlines - I have built up a list of hundreds of mom blogs out there and I am of the opinion that slimming that list down to a number of quality mom blogs and publishing their recent headlines would be a good service. It keeps our visitors up to date with a variety of places to go, supporting other Moms in the process, and hopefully the external promotional activity will generate some good will and gain the attention of a community of Moms online who are active.
- Base Pages - There are many pages that need building. I've built a publishing system to keep the pages all aligned with the same layout with the rest of the site and I've worked steadily on the content, but there is still much to do. Things like "How we can help promote your online businesses", a Feedback mechanism external to the forum, a listing of RSS feeds, our About page, Contact Page, Privacy Policy, etc.
- A queue of feature articles - As it stands, I'm finding something to write about and publishing new articles daily. This isn't the way to do things. I think I had a solid idea with the "And Yet, Here I Am" article and it could have been a lot better if I had taken a few days to let the content soak in and did some basic editorial work.
- Directory - I have flip-flopped on the direction of a directory, but essentially we do want to be able to provide some kind of a list of good mommy related sites out there - be they shopping sites, informative sites, medical sites, or whatever. Early on, I think I'm just going to replicate QuickSnips as a basic publishing interface, then standardize on a directory format at a later date
- Product Recalls - this goes under the ugly category, which I'll explain more about below.
- Ad Programs - The ad layouts are going to need to change and they shouldn't change significantly once we have attracted a decent sized user base.
- Forum Styling - in the forum, I'd like to fill in some of the blank space on the right side for users with wide screens, and to increase the importance of our main content pages search engine-wise through relevant consistent link structures. I updated the menu look on the main site, that needs to be done on the forums too.
- Site Search Engine - I have this technically done already, but it is not public. It's just one of the basics that any quality site has. Our site search engine is over the top as far as it's capabilities go, and in the coming months I will be expanding the functionality so that it maintains search data for a wide variety of quality mom sites.
- And a few other things... I have some back end tasks, like migrating icons into new directories to enforce browser caching rules, updating some icons on the forums, revisiting "last unread post" functionality and a few other items that will increase the quality level around here
The Ugly
I got the bright idea in my head to automatically post information about recalled products on this site as the news breaks about the recall. I thought this would be extraordinarily difficult at first glance, but fortunately I've built up a good deal of software over the last few months that lends itself very well to the task at hand. With a little bit of research, and with some of my existing code, it should have been easy. As it turns out, the base resources for obtaining the information are not very consistent with formatting which makes things much more arduous for me. Just when I thought I was done, I discovered some large flaws that will take me several more hours (after a couple of days of work already) to implement this.
The Future
We have big plans and big expectations for this site. We come up with new ideas daily about how to make this place a very good resource. Time is limited when you have two toddlers and a third baby that is going to be here any day now.
One of the things that I think will make our site special early on is the speed and consistency of new features, along with a regular stream of good information. I am of the mindset that even if we aren't the greatest site within our first thirty days that people will notice and appreciate that we are working hard to keep it headed in the right direction.
The goal is to hand this site over to Sarah while I move towards repeating a solid solution in other niche markets. At this point, Sarah already has a lot on her plate and doesn't get enough help from me to be able to do everything. She'll take over in due time, but for at least the short term future I'm going to remain heavily involved on a day-to-day basis. While I am writing most of the articles and quick snips for the moment, Sarah is providing a lot of the input and inspiration.
We'll move from daily feature articles to bi-weekly feature articles when we have enough of an article base in the hopper.
We also have a few unmentioned as of yet utilities and the like that will keep people interested. We can talk about those a bit more when the time comes.
Have I babbled enough? There's so much more. Another time, another day maybe.
