Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : i'm thinking about starting a business listing

[spiderfine]

i live in a small community name kerrville and there's about 22,000 people. there is already a mykerrville.com here and they list businesses here in kerrville and the surrounding areas. there's a few others like hillcountryads.com. anyway i wanted to do something like that. i just bought inkerrville.com, (what better way to find out what's in kerrville than to go to inkerrville.com?) i am not hosting it anywhere because i'm still working on a design, logo, and stuff. should i list like most search engines list or should i use a category list like the yellow pages? i would only be listing businesses in kerr county which is mainly all small hill country towns. any suggestions? am i getting in over my head? i want it to be simple and easy to find a business. thanx for your input.

spiderfine

[bitserve]

Well my opinion on the domain name, is that looks like ink-err-ville, not in-kerr-ville.

[akashik]

I'm about to do something very similar in my area (well state actually - thinking a bit bigger). It'll probably be directory based rather than search engine styled. For something like this I figure the more you can group things together into like-sites (automotive, law, computer sales, etc) the easier it will be for people to drill down to what they're looking for - possibly even have the twonships as the top directory, though that would depend on how many businesses you can add to fill it out. If it's small area where people can travel fairly easy, then the types of services may do for the top dir.

Hope that helps.

Greg Moore

[icanx]

Spider,
I think the domain name is fine as anyone in Central Texas will recognize Kerrville immediately.

I can tell you though, the local directories are a hard sell if you're wanting to make some money off of it. I'm a former Web Editor for the Victoria Advocate (Daily Newspaper) and we tried (and they are still trying) something similar. It's possible to get local ads, but you better be a pretty good salesman.

Of course if you're just doing it for fun, it should be just that..fun. You'll be surprised though how many local business owners have no clue (Still!) about why they should be on the internet.

Keep us informed of when you go live. I'd be interested to see what you come up with.

[akashik]

I think the best way to do this would be to just list everyone for free (and I mean *everyone*). Once the directory gets to a certain size people are going to notice they're well down the list. That's the time to suggest maybe a monthly fee for a bold link, or banner on the front page might prove effective. Done right in a small community that's not totally web-aware should net you a fairly decent ad rate.

That's a big thing now-days. Small micro community sites that provide freakishly targeted hits. You won't get rich off it (in fact I didn't see you mention income at all in your post), but you should be able to cover costs quite easily.

I personally doing it in my region for selfish reasons - I just want a site I can use to find local businesses. So far there isn't one.

Greg Moore

[spiderfine]

thanks all for your input. very helpful.

as far as income i was thinking about charging 79.00/yr for address and info only, 89.00/yr for link to their web site and 99.00/yr for just a page off my site, with a url something like: http://www.inkerrville.com/theirpage.htm. do those prices make sense?

i was also thinking about listing everyone from my church who owns their own business and list them for free to get going, maybe do search engine submittal for a few months, advertise in the paper, penny saver places like that and of course word of mouth. then start taking businesses and charging them. i'm really not doing this for fun, even though it's a blast, i'm doing it more for the money.

you can see a little rough draft if you'd like. i don't have a logo yet, just playing around getting a feel of how i want to design and word everything. i'm using frontpage, will that work for a site like this? here it is, remember just a rough draft:
www.spiderfine.com/kerrville.htm

thanks,

spiderfine

[akashik]

shows promise. I'm not liking the purple very much so the design could use some TLC. I like the text content though - has a nice community feel to it.

Greg Moore

[Chicken]

Originally posted by spiderfine
i just bought inkerrville.com, (what better way to find out what's in kerrville than to go to inkerrville.com?)

I'm a dumbass. When I first read this post, I was thinking to myself, what the heck does inker ville have to do with kerrville? Ink? Inker? Eh? Duhhh... I got it now... heh.

[akashik]

I think, as mentioned, it's a regional thing. If you lived there you'd probably get it right away

Greg Moore

[bitserve]

If you're going to be charging people money, you'll want to pay some money for a design. I think the current rough draft needs to totally go. I don't think that the design you currently have comes even close to looking professionally done.

Also, if you'll be charging for advertising on your listing, you'll need to do some major local advertising of the listing. Like billboards, local commercials. People aren't going to pay for advertising otherwise.

Well, it's just my opinion. But we don't spend money advertising on a web site unless that web site spends a lot of money doing targeted advertising for the web site.

[spiderfine]

your right, i do need to work on a design, but do you think front page will do? i really can't afford to hire someone right now, i sure wish i could though. maybe in the near future i could. how much do you charge? or how much does everyone charge for a nice design for this kind of site?

thanx

spiderfine