Creating websites

It’s has been awfully quiet on the blog for a month now, so long that even I started to wonder, whether or not we were actually doing anything or were just vacationing.

Well we have been doing something; we created ZiTYZEN Websites, which launched today. The grand idea behind this is simply that we have decided to create websites for those places on ZiTYZEN which do not have websites. The only thing the owner of the place has do to is to send us some text describing the place, some pictures, and describe the overall theme he wants for the website, then we’ll do the rest. We host the domain, host the files, and, through Google Apps, provide email accounts.

A ZiTYZEN website is linked to ZiTYZEN.dk, such that pictures, events, texts, reviews, etc. uploaded to the website is automatically shared with ZiTYZEN.dk. The information is initially displayed on ZiTYZEN.dk, and in the weeks to come we’ll connect ZiTYZEN.dk to other websites such that relevant material is shared with relevant websites, e.g. pictures are uploaded to flickr. This implies that the owner of a place only has to keep his own website up-to-date, we’ll take care of the rest of the web.

So why bother doing this? - We can easily extract a list of places without a website, so the marketing becomes slightly easier. Currently we have around 14000 places on ZiTYZEN, with around 4000 websites. Given that we haven’t found the websites for some of the places, we estimate that roughly 7000 places in total have websites. This implies that 50% already have a website, but we believe 90% would like to have a website, if the price and ease-of-use was right. This makes 5500 places, which wants a website.

Another reason for doing this is that ads are generating a lot less than we thought they would be, I guess we were a bit naïve to believe that we could run solely based on ads. Currently we have 4000 unique daily visits – 120.000 monthly visits, which yield 1.200$. This is simply not enough to run a website for a longer period of time, hence we need to start earning some real money.