Hydra Island GreeceHydra Island Greece is a natural option for us to start the launch of our site because Kelsey Edwards our Administrator is most intimate with this little gem of an island.

Hydra now sets the standard for the anticipated structure and content of all our island categories.

Crete, Ios, Lesbos and Rhodes will be the next islands to go live.

Constructive feedback will be much appreciated. We hope you enjoy our new site.

03-Oct-08 - Our site isn't really useful to visitors or advertisers yet because we're still working out the structure. No, it's not complete, so why have we made it live now rather than waiting?

With such a large and complex range of subjects to cover and the varying needs of the different types of users we anticipate to take into consideration, on a site that we intend making as interactive for visitors as possible allowing multiple people to contribute, create and edit content and images simultaneously - it takes time - testing and a good deal of trial and error to get the categories and menus balanced so that they work for all islands from both a technical and aesthetic angle. The list of behind the scenes jobs we're doing is ... well, quite frankly scary! So we're working very slowly and carefully to get the first island right and then will duplicate the structure for all of the others. In other words, we don't want to have to re-invent the wheel once we start rolling!

We're using Hydra as our starting point because it's the island best known to our Administrator. We have deliberately started at the deepest level of our site's structure and are building from the bottom-up to the home level to encourage more detailed content. We're aiming for intimacy of information rather than a superficial broad overview for each island that could have been more quickly achieved if we had started from the top-down or plagiarised from the millions of other sites on the Internet. Our aim is to make our site as transparent and as easy to reach the really "up-close and personal" detailed information we want it to contain as possible. We're concentrating our efforts at the moment on making sure that there are categories, forums, blogs and subject pages that can contain the information (articles, comments, topics and adverts) as they are created without having to restructure the entire site after all the other islands come online.

There are a number of reasons why we are live now and haven't waited until the site is more complete.

We are gathering feedback and testing functions, structure and ease-of-use with live "testers". Our testers are actively interacting with the site and they are creating and editing in a live environment, which in our opinion is far more valuable than if we were testing it in-house or in a laboratory situation.

By being live now on the Internet we are able to submit to search engines and so are in a position before launching our promotion campaign to optimise the site to get listed with a higher placement more quickly. The home page of the site already has a Page Rank of 3, which we are rather pleased with!

We are very keen to build reciprocal links that will help our popularity ranking but more importantly from our point of view, are actually useful to our visitors and not just a webmaster's method of artificially inflating their site's ranking. But of course to obtain links back to our site it needs to be live for other webmasters to see.

To achieve the depth of information and the level of "hands on, been there and done it" quality of content in the site, we are going to be very dependent on contributions from many people. We are actively recruiting Volunteer Contributing Editors (who get involved because they're passionate about their island), Photographers (who contribute images in exchange for a show case for their work) and Advertising Sales Agents (who will be paid commission) for each island or sales area. Additionally we will be approaching home owners on the islands to ask them to write articles for us about their experiences, the problems they've encountered, how they overcame the obstacles and what advice they would give to other people with the benefit of hindsight. And we will be approaching "experts" to ask them to operate blogs about their area of expertise and to answer forum questions. Again, our site is live now so that the people we are approaching and even visitors who have already found our site, can watch it growing and developing so they can better see how they can contribute with either short-term, long-term or just with an occasional involvement.

We're surprised but very pleased with the numbers of visitors who have already signed up with a member's login. The logs we keep of our statistics show that we are currently averaging 260 unique visitors per day from member's who are keeping an eye on the site as well as people, companies and search engines who are already finding us on the Internet.

We hope that is article gives you an idea of "where we're going" at the moment with our site and those who have actively supported us and shown an interest so far will enjoy seeing the site develop.

Ours is an ambitious project to undertake with a very small management team but we are very excited and enthusiastic about the results so far and are convinced that within a couple of years our website will be a popular and often referred to online guide for homeowners in the Greek Islands.

If you have any suggestions, requests for us to include other features, constructive criticism or other comments and feedback, please click here because we would sincerely like to hear from you.

Thank you for your interest.

If you use our website you are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of the username and password you use to access your account areas of the site and for restricting access to your computer to prevent unauthorised access to your account areas. You agree to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your username or password. You should take all necessary steps to ensure that the password is kept confidential and secure and should inform us immediately if you have any reason to believe that your password has in any way been compromised, or if the password is being, or is likely to be, used in an unauthorised manner. Please ensure that the details you provide us with are correct and complete. Please ensure your details are kept up-to-date to reflect any changes in your circumstances. You can access and update the information you provided us with in the Your Account area of the website. GreekIslandsRealEstate reserves the right to refuse access to the website, terminate accounts, remove or edit content at our discretion.

The most important of our aims, regarding the tone and approach we take concerning our website, is to put real people and their experiences to the forefront. Yes we consider techinical excellence of importance but we believe that people using the Internet, perhaps more so these days, still prefer to know that behind the technology they're dealing with there are real-live warm-blooded human-beings instead of just impersonal automated machines. This is why we highly value and appreciate volunteer content in the form of stories, blogs, comments, forum participation and feedback from our visitors and members as well as the efforts of our Volenteer Contibuting Editors and our Sales Agents, because their contibutions not only make our site rich in content and keywords but equally as important, they make our site more real, approachable and human. This philosophy is followed through by our policy of moderating content; ensuring that everything is approved by real people before it is published on our website.

We really mean it honestly. We would prefer our site to be in Greek as well as English, come to that we'd like it to be truly multi-lingual, because we know that the information and adverts it will contain will be as useful and appealing to Greeks and local island residents as it is to other foreigner homeowners in Greece who don't read English easily.

But the sad fact of the matter is that we are an English company with a small English management team who just can't speak let alone write in the Greek language to a standard anywhere near acceptable.

Added to the fact that the Greek language for us personally is an insurmountable barrier, our investigations into paying for development and translation of an ever-changing mirror site as well as the technical administration of supporting another language with duplicated data-entry forms, editing facilities, instructions and coding, plus meta-tagging of all the content to ensure good keywords, titles and descriptions that would appeal to search engines, and of course the on-going work of approving entries in a second language, proved to be such an expensive option, which we don't have the budget to cover that we took the decision to present the site in English only. And to go further, we opted for the universally used computer-programming version of the language making our decision not so much nationalistic but made mindful of the fact that technically websites are programmed and coded predominantly in English behind what is displayed.

We sincerely hope that the Greek users of our site understand our reasoning to opt for "a computer language" only and realise that in spite of it not being presented in Greek our site exists because of our appreciation, pleasure and wanting to share our enthusiasm for living in Greece and its beautiful islands.

The GIRE homeowners directory is based on a hierarchical structure with the island groups as top level categories, the Greek islands within each group below them as sub-categories and then for each island there are further categories which include: