Name of your website?PanamaCentric.com
Your name?
Richard
Your Location (city, etc)
Panama
Please give us a short summary of your website?
A personal space to share with friends, both current and future. Somewhere to store and share photos and thoughts.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Boredom lol Coupled with a desire to learn new techniques, both in terms of design, and traffic building. Also the first article I wrote was turned down by other panama sites because it didn't pander to the sell sell sell advertisers. That was the real impetus to go ahead.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
September 2006, Panama-webhosting.com.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
I live centrally in Panama, Panama is centric within the Americas, and a crossroads for world trade. Plus it's a wonderful country to retire in.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
ME :)
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
No specific goals, I run the site for my own pleasure.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
I could probably earn more working as a maid or gardener, but that wouldn't give me the same level of satisfaction or interest. For me, it's the challenge that matters most.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
No change.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
What demand? I'm not selling anything. At the present time I'm using less than 10% of the capacity from the basic hosting package from Panama-webhosting, plenty of bandwidth and storage space for the foreseeable future.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
None, all has been plain sailing so far, although my experience moderating a yahoo group tells me that spammers will show up sooner or later.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Writing articles. I'm no great author, but enjoy the challenge and aim to improve as time goes on. I left high school at 16, worked 35 years in construction and am now enjoying a new learning experience in semi retirement.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
That's what I'm trying to find out :) Testing lots of different free avenues and learning. Too early to make any real judgements yet, but any traffic is good.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
I expected the building to be more complicated, due to only having created Html pages in the past with Frontpage. However, using Joomla Cms made the whole process much more enjoyable, thanks to the number of addons made freely available by other users.
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 put up the site in march 2007, originally it was built using another system, but I couldn't find all the bits I wanted to include. So I spent a month doing a complete rebuild using Joomla, and then redirected the domain. I will keep the site up for my own pleasure, irrespective of traffic or popularity.
What is your website address?
PanamaCentric.com
