dslade.blog

Previously to my career at VNU BME, I helped a friend relaunch his site targeting private lessons in the U.S. It was a great idea that had a lot of trouble getting off the ground. As so many good ideas do. When I went to VNU, it consumed nearly every second of my life, and I all but shelved the project. Out of curiosity, I checked the log stats the other day, and discovered the site is doing average 10,000 PVs a month. My jaw almost dropped. It’s not a huge amount but I almost thought for sure the site was dead.

Quick background: The idea was basically to build a directory site targeting anyone who wants to teach or take lessons in something. The business model needed work, but it was fun putting it together and teaching my friend that there was ways of building websites without MS Frontpage. Warning: it’s still very garage/back bedroom start-up frontpage-esque.

Where did it go wrong? Well, I think there was two main issues:

A) pricing model for the ads. I won’t share the details (and don’t want to ), at the time sites like craigslist were starting to dominate the world of classified ads.

B) hosting / domain name problems. We had to change the domain name due to questionable trademark complain (note to self, do more research on trademarks in the future), so that came out of nowhere and bit us. After changing the domain and migrating the site, we had problems getting traffic over time, and later discovered the hosting company had somehow reactivated our old domain/DNS, so we had two sites with exact same content being indexed on the web. I thought for sure we got thrown to the google sandbox.

C) the UI was clunky. OK, it was really bicycle with square wheels. To help give his project a kick-start and given the time constraints, we took an off-the-shelf, or packaged, classified ads system, and hacked the hell out of it to do what we wanted it to do. It was at least a hair better than the dozens of odd static pages that my friend had pieced together before.

Well, with that much traffic, and in need of a hobby, maybe I’ll strip it to the basics, and start rebuilding it. And pray that google adsense manages to bring in enough for the hosting it some day.

Check it out if you’re in the US and interested in private lessons.

Some day, given enough boredom and free time, begging friends for developer and design time, this site will be great.