Search Antigua’s Weblog

Well, it’s early Sunday morning and from all angles the site seems to be doing well. We have been getting a lot more direct traffic also a good amount of organic users from the Search Engines. During the past few days we have made a few tweaks to the site formula – so far we have not heard any negative remarks, mostly compliments and encouragement. Yesterday we had an article about us in the newspaper written by Joanne Hillhouse. It was very nice and I like her style of writing. Next week we have a few more media appearances.

Our Gorilla Marketing Campaign seemed to have paid off. Next week I will be doing some more le work but for now trying to relax…

Many of you have been asking what inspired us to develop Search Antigua. Well… there’s a few but I will list only a few…

For starters, we have been working in the Web Industry for years and we have come across literally hundreds of websites about Antigua and Barbuda. However, if you ask the everyday Antiguan to name five they would be hard pressed to do so. So we decided one of the ways we can expose more of these websites to the general public would be to develop a portal or a directory. But the days of Web Portals and Internet Directories are gone people want information by typing in a few keywords they don’t want to search through categories and taxonomies. So the idea of the search engine was born.

In addition there is so much stuff on the internet nowadays that it is hard to wade through all of it to find what you want. So we made it easy by localizing the search items. So part of the inspiration behind Search Antigua is to bridge this gap and helps people easily find, share and search content that is relevant to them.

Alright, sorry for the long-winded babble. But since you’ve been asking, that’s that. And just know… we’re just getting started and seriously can’t wait to show you what we got in the pipelines. Hmm…

We’ve been so busy with our launch, we didn’t even have a chance to give you a formal welcome. Well… welcome! Come on in. And sorry for the slightly grumpy post a couple days ago…sleep deprivation does that.

So what’s all this talk about searchAntigua.com and what does it do? Well, we think you just gotta see it. But in a nutshell we like to say that we’re the Antiguan version of google. In addition to our powerful search engine that searches the net for local web content the web site offers several other useful services:

Classified Ads – (Our favorite by far) offers anyone the opportunity to sign up and post an ad about anything they want. This ad will then be viewable by anyone else who visits the classifieds section so that’s literally hundreds of eyeballs a day looking at your items……

Event Calendar – Another nifty tool that shows  the dates of  events that are taking place locally we really hope everyone will contribute to this one so that we can have a really packed activity list

Map – this is maybe the first interactive online map of Antigua and Barbuda it allows you to zoom in and move around the map and view places of interest, historical sites and many other locations that may spark your interest.

Chat – this is how site users get to interact with me or other members of the team. We also have all the social networks listed on this page.

That’s the gist. But there’s lots more… so have a look around.

Hope you enjoy the Search Antigua experience!

Day 2. What the deuce is going on? I hear a lot of complaining coming out of the tech “dungeon” about no sleep, eating junk food day and night and persistent finger cramp syndrome? I hate to bring this up, but What Would Steven Seagal Do? But jokng aside the launch went as smooth as we could have hoped for. We had a few minor complaints (mostly internet explorer based) but we are working on them for now and checking the stats to see how organically the site grows…by the way did anyone pick up the newspaper today?  I think we have some classified ads in it!

Seriously, who has time for these blog things? We’ve just been up for like the last three days straight. Hair ridiculously nappy eyes are pretty much beyond bloodshot and baggy. A collection of snack containers piling up around the desks.

The saddest thing about this all? I seem to be loving it. Pretty sad, huh. I guess this is true geekdom.

Anyway, in less than 24 hours the real fun begins.

The website has come a long way since it’s inception on the 1st of October, 2007. Almost two solid months of hardwork and limited sleep so that we are somewhat prepared for the tidal wave of users that are fast approaching. We’re a few days away from launch, the emails are pouring in, the wait list is growing, and people are already blogging about this. It’s hard to believe that after 8 weeks of pretty much zero life, and staring at the computer every waking minute that we’re actually about to open this all up to the public. But getting this out there has been what it’s all about, and we seriously can’t wait to show you what we got behind the curtain. It’s still in beta while we work out the kinks, but we think you’ll like what you see so far.

Thanks to everyone who’s been part of our closed beta phase and to our amazing testers. And huge thanks to all those bloggers and other crazy fans who have encouraged us before we even launched.
What you’ll be seeing next week on the 21st is something we’re really proud of. It’s also really just the start of what’s to come. We seriously have a bazillion things in mind and we’re dying to get to them.

But enough about this I still have some work to do before the launch.

It is coming…

~ by Ken Shipley