I own a great domain… LaWeb.com. I’ve owned if for years and have never done anything with it. But it’s a new year and I’m doing some spring cleaning, so a little while ago, I actually made the site live and threw something up there… a standard CMS install of what is leading software. Tried the others too, not sold on any of them.
But in doing all of this playing, I did throw a Google Analytics tracking thingy in the templates. So now I know where my traffic is coming from, and it’s pretty good traffic if I must say so myself, for having absolutely nothing there, not even being live until recently.
So these charts made me sit up and think… Now I’m shopping for a developer! I want a developer that will share ad revenue generated from the site in return for a discount on services. By doing this, it gives the developer “skin in the game” and incentive to produce a better site with more useful features, etc. You see, I will more than gladly compensate with ad revenue, any discount given for services… Hell, I’ll even over pay out of ad revenue! Develop better product, make more money! Pretty simple I think :-)….
There are hurdles though…. I don’t speak Spanish, and it’s apparent that the site should be in Spanish and geared towards a Latin market (geography of the Latin market is secondary, I think). Different cultures have different social values, which is why I am looking for a developer that is fluent in these cultures, etc. I don’t want it developed in Kansas and then translated into Spanish, that just wouldn’t work and I’m sure we’d get some really interesting translations from it :-)!
Some of the other things to consider is development time and attracting users. The site and your income will depend on this…. I don’t think years should be spent developing to attract 100 users, but then again, I don’t want to spend 10 minutes developing crap that has a life-span of 10 minutes.
I have thought a lot about this, and each time I come back to a community/myspace/social networking kind of site. Maybe it gets built on top of one of those frameworks (drupal, joomla, etc.) to speed development, maybe not, I’m not sure. I’m looking for input from my developer on this. I want my developer to be a partner in this, not just a “gun for hire”.
Which brings me back to why I am typing about all of this here…. Well, finding a developer is a real pain in the ass! I am willing to pay, but don’t have a lot to do so with (which is why I would love to defer discount+ to ad revenue and am very willing to off-shore it although I haven’t had a lot of success there (takes a lot of hand holding)….), so I thought I’d vent about it here for a number of reasons…. Maybe it will get me some traction (email me here if you’re an interested developer) and I figure maybe it will be interesting to follow the progress. I’ll keep you up to date about the project, and be quite open about it too if you want :-). So let me know and I’ll keep typing….