Has it been a month already?
The site has been up for just over a month and well, let's just say it's been quite an interesting month. Praise, requests, and complaints, we've had the lot (and we're loving it)!
"So how's the site going?" I hear you ask.. Well much better than expected to be honest. The month of April had over 6,000 unique visitors, and when you consider that it's a new domain and we haven't advertised anywhere, it's actually quite good. Much better than our initial expectations.
Search Engine Results
For those that don't know, when google first indexes a new domain, it usually takes a good 3 to 12 months (on average it usually takes about 6) to get any sort of results for competive keywords. This is due to the new domain penalty highlighted in the Hilltop Algorithm paper which essentially stops new sites spamming the web with unrelated results. As an example, searching for Bowral Southern puts us in positions 1 and 2 in google. Search for Bowral Highlands though and you'll see we are nowhere. With Highlands being a competitive keyword, we won't see any real results until middle to late 2005. MSN is doing well with #1 results for most of the town names and local businesses, but Yahoo on the other hand has at this point only indexed 3 pages (thanks to the new domain), but all 3 rank #1 or #2 for their targeted keywords so it is looking promising there.
The Feedback
The response to the site in April has been very encouraging with over 30 requests for sponsored links, a few requests for customised listings and I've lost count of people asking to have their sites redesigned. Seems like people want to give us their money. We had thrown the idea around of doing paid listings, etc, but the site was built to be free for the local community, so the smaller local businesses who just don't come up in search engines finally will (at no cost to themselves). This brings us up to the next point.
We had a few emails from people wanting to know where we're going with this site (most were just curious, but some were actually quite aggressive which we found quite amusing). Basically the idea behind the site was to give the little store in the little town a go on the web. Normally the business would have to pay to get a listing on other sites, and this way we could get them search engines visibility for free. It also helps us as when we're trying to find local businesses (Bowral Motorcycles for example), we search the web. If nothing comes up we have to hit the Yellow Pages, and that's something lazy developers usually try to avoid.
And what about the future?
Well, the site is a side project for a few local developers that found they had similar interests. At the moment it's really nothing more than a hobby site, and there was certainly no monetary motivation behind building it. It's pretty much an exercise in content management, feeding bits of data into other bits of data and so on. We all have real jobs in the industry, and so we try to work on the site when we have some spare time, but the last month was actually quite hectic for a couple of us work wise (with the Apple Tiger launch , a presentation for a tv show, and a flash site for a Sydney graphic design firm that needed to be completed), so if we didn't reply to your emails, we're sorry but we'll eventually get to them, honest!
The funny thing is, the emails we did receive regarding our plans with the site did get us talking about the possibilities. A Highlands wedding site, an accommodation booking service, a Highlands real estate portal, weekend tours service, we could pretty much go anywhere with this thing. That said though, at the moment we're all busy enough as it is, so we'll just have to take things a day/week/month at a time :)
What about the site then?
We have a lot of features in testing that haven't been enabled yet, a flash based mapping system driven by XML data, free booking system for accommodation houses, real estate listing application with a flash based panoramic walk-through system (this is actually quite cool, but time consuming), a flash based interactive tour guide, flash based photo galleries, as well a bunch of other miscellaneous type features. We were trying to avoid the use of flash as we're big fans of accessibility and web standards, but there some things that aren't really possible without it. In regards to the upcoming features, some will get used, and others will probably stay in testing forever. We'll have to see what happens.
So all in all, a decent month for the site, and things can only get bigger and better!
See you all next month
The Southern Highlands team
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