Name of your website?RideTips.com - Snowboard Information
Your name?
Tom B.
Your Location (city, etc)
Cadillac
Please give us a short summary of your website?
RideTips.com is a website for snowboard information thats unique and timely.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I have been in the ski/snowboard industry for over 10 years teaching, so I thought why not build a site about what I know.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
I launched my first website in 1998, it was my juggling website http://www.tombartholomew.com
How did you decide on a name for your website?
I searched for days trying to find a domain name that was easy to remember, relevant, and generic all at the same time. You know domains are hard to find these days.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
RideTips.com website is different because it posts what users want about snowboarding.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
For now I want to keep it and branch out to other ride sport specific sites.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Hard to say as I have just started to really focus on expanding and growing the website.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would branch out in sub domains like skiing.ridetips.com, wakeboarding.ridetips.com, skateboarding.ridetips.com, etc..... and hire experts in those areas to develop each sub domain.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Definitely!
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
None so far. I am using Open Source tools to develop my site like Joomla for content management and Gimp for image editing.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Link building
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Link building
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
I didn't get much traffic at first, so I guess learning about seo has been something I didn't expect when I started.
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 purchased the domain in 2007 (about one year now) and built a site but left it for 8 months with no updates. Now its been 1 month of real invested time running the site and I am going to continue to do it as long as I am interested in snowboarding.
If you could give some one advice about starting a website, what would it be?
Get a good domain, and have a plan about what you want your website to do. Oh yeah use open source programs to run your website, why pay money?
What is your website address?
RideTips.com - Snowboard Information
