Name of your website?Spiral Cat Translations
Your name?
Brett
Your Location (city, etc)
Vienna
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We are two native speakers (one Uk English, one Austrian German) who do translations from English to German and from German to English.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
We want to be able to work from anywhere. the dream is to be hammering away at a keyboaed with the sound of wind chimes in the background on the beach of a south seas island.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Our first website was an incarnation of the present one but on a free hoster that plastered adds all over it with audio that was on as a default setting. We transfered over to office live and things are still free and a bit bumpy from time to time, but better.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
We also write and illustrate childrens books and Spiral Cat is one of our favourite characters.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
We are very dedicated to finding the best translation and at the same time keep the tone of the original document. An ad for clothes should read differently to a disertation.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
It would be great if all our income came through the internet and we were no longer tied to a physical area to do our work in. We want to be able to work anywhere, anytime with a laptop.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
We are a very young company and the money invested has had to be kept as close to absolute zero as possible. This of course takes time, but it is possible and very rewarding. When you find a free solution for something that might have cost hundreds of euros it's good.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We would advertise. This is the real missing peace of the jigsaw right now although free listings like your site really help.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Translation is a time consuming art and we would not be able to keep up but we would be able to pick our work a little more.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Office live has been great over all (it is free) but the email just went down for a whole week. Almost all our contacts come through email and this has been a bad time for us but it seems to be getting better and we will probably stick with the platform.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Time has been the number one problem. And using the time wisely, it is very easy to waste time on the internet but you must also stick with it if you know what you want is out there but the searches are not returning the results you need. You will eventually find the search terms that will throw up what you want, and often for free.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Free listings pages have brought the most traffic for us but search engines ares starting to notice us and compete with them.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Google ads have been disapointing. I think the prices charged for web advertising are currently undervalued and can only go up.
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?
The site has existed for over half a year now and I want it to be there forever. Future generations will look at it and marvel at how primitive the whole internet thing was.
How should you measure success?
However you do it, not with numbers.
What is your website address?
Spiral Cat Translations
