Name of your website?First Trip to Alaska
Your name?
Joseph Dawson
Your Location (city, etc)
Laguna Hills
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Site gives a family's experience planning and carrying out a successful vacation to Alaska in 2007. We describe our airline, railroad, and motorhome travel and our impressions of Anchorage, Denali, Seward, Homer, and the Kenai Peninsula.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I wanted to set up a website for years and now, in retirement, I did it! My wife has planned really great vacations for years and we wanted to give internet vistors the feeling of actually going on an Alaska vacation. This is the kind of site we were looking for while we were planning our trip.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
This (http://www.firsttimealaska.com/) is our first website and we launched in at the end of November in 2007.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
I just started entering possible names into Google and 'firsttimealaska' was not there, so I found a website host (BlueHost) and entered the name and it was available.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
It's our unique experience and there's room on the web for everyone's story. We found similar sites and we enjoyed each of them for different reasons.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
We hope to take other vacations to Alaska, at which point, I will put the current pages in a '2007 vacation' archive category and replace them with the new vacation content. We don't see any commercial value.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It was a very satisfying. My wife and I rarely enjoy working together but this was wonderful. The money investment was very modest and Google ads may even pay that. My wife is already planning our next site.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Nothing, we like our homey, low-tech site the way it is.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
I assume our BlueHost servers could handle any traffic we could have.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Nothing yet.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Getting listed in Google.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Listing our url with Google, Yahoo and MSN (so far).
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Site hasn't needed much attention so far.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Three months... until we get tired of it (if possible).
Replace this with a question of your own
Is there a translate feature to show my site in Spanish?
What is your website address?
First Trip to Alaska
