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.