The Total Croatia Website Project - what is it and how is it growing so quickly?Lots of people have asked me about the Total Croatia website project, and the interest tends to centre around two areas - what is the ultimate aim of the website, and how in the world is it growing so quickly, especially when the owner knows almost nothing about web design. I will attempt to answer both these questions below. 1. What is the aim of the Total Croatia website project? Having lived in Croatia for seven years now, I have a reasonable understanding of what visitors are looking for. In the heady days of the 2004 property boom (please come back!), Croatia websites for property and British agents were ubiquitous, but as the crisis happened, so those agencies closed down and with them, most of the websites. There was a freshness in the information being given out five years ago, but with the very notable exception on the Visit Croatia forum (http://visitcroatia.proboards.com), there is very little in English that is current and relevant, apart from the generic Croatia websites for tourism. With more and more tourists complaining about this over the summer, an idea came to me over a cold Lasko - why not create such a site? A Croatia website that covered the basics of travel and tourism, but more than that, which looked at areas with little or no information in English (Croatia for kids, Croatia for the disabled, the Croatian bobsled team, and yes they DO exist!). As the goat juice took effect with the next bottle, my idea got more expansive. If I could build a website where people could upload their travel tips, restaurant reviews, museum opening times, with an interactive self-upload, very quickly we could have a wonderful Croatia website resource for everyone - tourists, expats, locals, everyone. The key was to link everything correctly. I had in my head a friend in Starigrad on Hvar who is very creative and makes excellent condiments, as well as shoes from plastic bags - really excellent stuff and she deserves a wider platform. If I could build a website where people could upload their information, where I moderated before publishing to ensure quality, then linked it effectively, why shouldn't this work and become a great Croatia website resource for all. She writes a page with photos (one of which could be a map of how to find her), I link it the these various pages - Starigrad, Hvar island arts and crafts and Hidden Croatia, and she has a window to the world for free! Future tourists planning their holidays online in the office will be interested to visit, print off the page and business will be done. And so I started to research to see if I could find a system that could provide me this platform cheaply. It took me four days of research online to ensure it was not a scam, but ultimately I found what I thought was the perfect product. It wasn't - it was ten times better than that, showing me not only where my keyword focus should be for Croatia, but helping me to build the site from scratch with no web design skills required, analysing each page to make sure it was Google friendly, emailing each week to show me any broken links. Building the Total Croatia website has been time consuming and a challenge, but with this level of support, it has become a lot easier. And then there were the support forums. But I am getting ahead of myself... I got started, wrote some content and reached out to other people interested in Croatia on the web. On Day 18, I got confirmation that the Total Croatia Website project is going to work - my first submission from the web! And what a submission! It came from a Dutch artist in Ghana who was writing about a glass painting course in northern Croatia. An obscure topic, but someone out there will be looking for that information. Once I received a couple more art submissions, I created an art section, very small for now, but any art related resources will get added to and the section will slowly expand. This could be a great platform for Croatian artists to showcase their work for free, for example. At time of writing this (end of September, 2010), we are already 450 pages and there are some truly fine submissions already. But I want this resource to grow quickly so that small businesses can benefit for next season. There must be hundreds of great small businesses like my plastic shoe friend who nobody ever hears about - submit your content and you can have a window to the world. I am working on improving the structure of the site, so the links will be even more relevant. There is no need to stop at tourism. Why not have a free page for every business in Croatia? Let's create a business directory as the country moves towards the EU - it will be a valuable resource. What about Croatian nature - a bird enthusiast can upload pages about Croatian wildlife and the best birdwatching spots and advertise their services on the site. For free! A Croatia website for all. And so on, and so on. It is amazing how expansive the mind can get after a couple of Laskos... So join us, to create the best online resource for Croatia. Whatever your motivation - promoting your business, a love of writing, a wish to highlight a hidden aspect of Croatia, you write it, we will publish it. Which brings us to... 2. How is the Total Croatia website project growing so quickly? Let me be open - I knew very little about online marketing when I was sipping that Lasko in early August. Building websites? I knew something, enough to tinker with and edit a site beautifully built by others, but there was no chance that I could build a website from sctatch. Online marketing is a scary and murky world. So many promises, so many scams. While looking for my system, I quickly learned to take a site name, insert it into Google and add 'spam' to the search; that would weed out 90% of scams in one go. There was one system that looked very, very good, had rave reviews from lots of people, whose websites were professional and high up in the search engines. There were several blogs trashing this system, with a keenness that was a little bit scary. I was beginning to think that I had found my platform. I read everything I could, including a forum discussion of more than 100,000 words trashing the system. I joined the debate and my mind was made up after receiving less than satisfactory answers to my questions from the detractors. Perhaps I could build my Croatia website with this system. The system cost $300 a year which was a lot for a leap into the dark, and I was reluctant to pay that much, but they did have a recession-busting monthly option of $29.99, which you could revert to the $300 any time you started making money. $29.99 for a month - even if it turned out to be a scam, all I could lose was that amount and presumably in the worst case scenario, I would learn something to that value or beyond. I signed up and them my eyes were truly opened to something magical. WOW! From memory (although only seven weeks ago, it seems such a long time ago...), this is what I would get for my $29.99 a month: a ten day action guide video which would take me through the various stages of building the site - brainstorming the idea, getting the look and feel, adding graphics, links, contact pages etc; a brainstorming tool which would help me analyse the most searched for terms for my niche topic - Croatia. Further brainstorming to show me which topics with my niche had an imbalance of poor supply of information for that keyword, versus large demand; how to methodically rise up the search engines (no quick SEO fix here, slowly but surely); a tool to analyse each page for Google-friendliness before publishing, a weekly email informing me of all the links. And more, much much more. I listened to the ten day video guide and mention was continually made of the forums, how useful they were and how they were the friendliest online forum on the web. A nice cheesy North American sales pitch I thought, until I had a question about my homepage. I decided to take a look and was blown away not only by the depth of the forum (more than eighty specialist forums for every step of the process - and every one had an entry that day, actually multiple entries). I decided to introduce myself and only then did I begin to learn how truly powerful, diverse and international this system really is. After excitedly finding that Google had found my homepage and put it on the first page of Google after only two days, I decided to post on the Introduce Yourself forum. Within hours, I had messages of welcome, congratulations, advice and encouragement from America (www.decolish.com), Serbia (www.cool-small-pets.com) and Nigeria - my favourite - (www.dating-tips-for-realmen.com). After three weeks, I decided to take advantage of the Site Review forum, where you can submit your site for critical analysis by your peers. Invaluable feedback and advice poured in from Australia (www.vinodiversity.com), America (www.homeownershipdebthelp.com, www.north-america-wilderness-backpacking.com and www.travel-austin-texas.com), from Canada (www.drought-smart-plants.com), and from some horse-loving part of the planet, I know not where (www.horsecrazygirls.com). I could go on, but the point is that here are a seemingly random bunch of people with no discernible interst in Croatia, taking the time to give help and advice to a newbie like me. For free! I went back to the cheesy line in the video and have to agree that it it is not only the friendliest but also the most useful online community I have every come across. Without their help, the Total Croatia website would be nowhere near as advanced. Currently I am grappling with the weird science that is Google Adsense, but Tom from www.jack-russell-lover.com in New Zealand is guiding me through while David from www.altered-art.net has been doing a sterling effort helping me keep the Google spiders at bay from some duplicate copy I have. Philip from www.south-african-diaspora-solutions.com helped me through an issue I had with Google Analytics, Myra from www.kundalini-yoga-info.com helped me sort a IE7 browser incompatibility problem and Jacki from www.vocationvillage.com has been invaluable on strategy for links to and from the site. Heroes all! And sincere thanks. I could go on (and on), but I hope you get the point that what you get for your $29.99 a month is so much more than advertised on the tin. An additional feature which is helping us create this great online resource for Croatia is the submission form - you send us your info with or without pictures, I will publish and link it. Easy to write, easy to publish, easy to link, easy to build this great online resource. If I can build a Total Croatia website, anyone can. So how can you learn more about this amazing system? Simply click here! (coming soon, and no I am not trying to keep the suspense going, simply I need to find the right link and I have a meeting - more later).
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