Site Development Spec

Fergal C

I am currently seeking a designer / developer to do some work on Proudirish.com. Please see the specification of requirements here.

Any comments or suggestions as to how I can improve this spec would be appreciated. I am also intetested in any suggestions wrt evaluating responses.

Should you be interested in this work please PM me with your email address and I'll contact you once the spec has been finalised.

Thanks,

buddy

I'm in a smilar league to yourself with developing websites so I won't be tenderign but I do have a question about your website - the "Store" section looks like mainly links to other online Irish web sites/stores. Will you be selling through the site or at least securing some kind sof banner ads/link trade with these sites?

Fergal C

Buddy,

The plan is to develop an ecommerce facility and sell directly from the site.

Karoma

i think http://www.web-redesign.com/ had some useful examples/templates ...

Fergal C

Karoma,

Thanks for the link. Useful information there, I like the stuff about defining your audience and outlining what will make your site successful.

fhugh

Without sounding like i'm pissing on your parade here, but dont sites like www.irishabroad.com and www.celtic.com have the market pretty much sewn up?

Oh! And www.celticlinks.com ...

Its a bit saturated as it is in my very, very humble opinion.

H

nahdoic

There's always room for more. Especially if you can offer a far more personal feel. Both of those sites look very impersonal to me. Maybe in old school commerce that whole "the market is saturated" were true. But competition on the net is so fierce if you can provide a better service you are going to gain market share.

A competitor is only ever a click away.

IMHO of course.

Fergal C

Especially if you can offer a far more personal feel

Thanks Nahdoic, that's exactly what I want to do. Celtic.com is actually a new one on me. But yes there are quite a few and I have plans to differentiate Proudirish.com.

Irish Abroad was bought for about 5M and then had another 5M invested in it, at the height of the dot com boom. Obviously a different ball game to my part time site. My plan is to keep investment very low, offer a more personal service and build traffic and sales over time.

Progress has been much slower than I'd hoped, hence contracting out some of the work.

nahdoic

Taking baby steps - and growing it slowly and steadily is certainly a good approach (adam recommends it too!). It will just take time to build it up. And a lot of persistence.

It does work though - look at StatCounter I grew that very, very slowly over 5 years - each year getting more and more popular. (getting 450 new accounts a day now )

And I'm in a very, very saturated market.

Fergal C

getting 450 new accounts a day now

Excellent, well done. Do you work on Statcounter full time?

nahdoic

Originally posted by Henri
Do you work on Statcounter full time?

I try to work on it full time as well as go to college full time, which doesn't leave a lot of time for anything else. The last year has been a real balancing act.

But I'll be graduating in the next few months and will be able to work on it full time then. It's making enough to support my salary now. But this is just the beginning. Those big boy web analytic providers better watch out

Philbert

Nahdoic, you must spend a lot of time on SEO. You're ranking 4 on google for "traffic" and "hit counter" and you're first for "website traffic" and "website traffic counter". Thats some achievment!

Henri sorry to go off topic:)

nahdoic

Aye I do spend a lot of time making sure my site is user friendly and search engine friendly - which means the same thing to me.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

nahdoic

Sweet! You get that much returns on the ads from people checking their stats - WOW!

Oh believe me it's been a very long journey to get the traffic needed for this. And I have tried to diversify and exploit every revenue potential of it, without losing its integrity or commitment to providing the best possible website stats to webmasters and site owners out there.

- Tribal Fusion for the banner space has been superb. They are paying so much more than ValueClick or Advertising.com.

- Google Adsense is just brilliant for another revenue source.

- Selling text links directly to advertisers of webmaster related products and services has been very succesful.

- Members upgrading their accounts everyday is building yet another revenue stream.

Google must like your site with all the incoming links!

Yes. Yes it does. But so do all the search engines these days, but Google especially.