Name of your website?Costa Listings - Spain
Your name?
Mike Davies
Your Location (city, etc)
Javea
Please give us a short summary of your website?
The idea being that trying to find essential information and services in Spain is not easy for people who do not speak Spanish at a very high level.
Our website aims to tackle this problem by gathering together as much information on the local area as possible and presenting it in an easy to follow format, this includes everything from eating out, shops and shopping, business services, real estate and essential guides.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
After moving to Spain last year, I found it very difficult to get the basic information that you take for granted back home. Silly things like local road laws, tax laws, finding a mechanic etc. so after 6 months of struggling I decided to try and make it easier for myself and other people in the same situation.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
My first website was actually an online auctions site, this was a good few years ago now before the influx of copycat scripts that you see available these days. The site was 100% coded in house and we had a very good design team working with us. The problem of course is that with an auction type site, the real value of the site lies in the users and trying to convince users to move away from something they are used to, even if they are not totally happy with it, proved impossible given our limited budget.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
The name of the website was decided on to give our users good idea of what we do as quickly as possible and hopefully it is quite catchy too!
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
Most websites about the local area tend to fall short in the quality of their information and the number of listings they contain we are breaking away from this mold by paying special attention to the quality of our site and making sure that there is always new and interesting information for users to follow.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
The eventual goal of the website really is to provide a good interface for people like us to find what they need on the Costa Blanca. Making an income from the website is also very important of course to allow us to continue filling the site with fresh content.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
There are a few additional features we would like on the site but they generally speaking these are not very complex and we plan to add them ourselves in the near future. We could however spend a good amount of money on building the content of the site, it takes more time than you might think gathering all the information required to create a compelling article or business listing!
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
I don�t think this would be a huge problem given the relatively niche market that we occupy the website has been designed to meet much higher demands than we expect to receive in the near future and it's all running on a good spec dedicated server.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Online promotion has always been a sticking point with me, I've never had much of a problem getting the technical side of things moving but my previous experience has not involved a lot of promotion so this is still a very large learning curve for me.
What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge for me personally has been the promotion side of things, coming from a technical background this is all very new to me and I am still learning from my mistakes.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Not really, having run a few websites previously I was well aware that the phrase 'build it and they will come' simply does not apply to websites and that the amount of work needed to create a good website with compelling content is not as easy as it sounds.
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?
I can�t say exactly how long I would like to run the website for into the future, I think once we are happy with what we have here we would like to expand the concept into other areas, initially in Spain and then possibly into other popular expat regions in the world.
What is your website address?
Costa Listings - Spain
