As I had hoped, version 1.0 of Bahamas.CO has launched, with a few days to spare. The website was built on WordPress, and I opted to use a heavily modified template due to time constraints (I needed to have the site launched by August 20th) as part of the .CO Registry’s Founders Program.
The template modification was completed by my web designer Mike McAlister of Six One Five Design, who has done the majority of my design work for the last three years. Usually he builds my sites from scratch, but he knew I was under the proverbial gun on this project, and he jumped in to make the necessary template modifications. For those that are curious, I used the Los Angeles template available on ThemeForest.net (affiliate link) for $32 out of the box.
I also previously mentioned that the logo was designed as part of a contest on 99Designs.com, and ironically the winner of the contest was Theo Develegas of Acroplex. Not only was it my favorite logo, it was also voted as the favorite by you guys, which is always a good thing to see.
I had around 40 articles created by a writer I found on eLance. I added all of the articles, found photos on iStockphoto.com and Flickr, and I coordinated the photos and articles. I still need to do a bit of internal page linking in the next few days, to better enable people to find the pages.
For the next couple of months, I will monitor the website, work on SEO, add articles and photographs, and see how it performs in the search engines. With some extra work, the traffic will grow, and I will begin to work on phase two, integrating a hotel and activities booking engine. In a few months, I will update you on traffic stats and the all important search engine stats, which will be interesting to me (and probably you) because of the .CO domain name.
Until then… thanks for reading.
Nice, clean, bright, easy to nav and to the point of what one may look for… congrats on the launch.
Great looking clean site. Just FYI, the footer looks a bit weird.
Simple and clean design, I like it. Congrats!
@ Raman
What were you expecting and what made you have those expectations?
Great site Elliot.
Any chance you can share the approximate costs for writing services?
Thanks,
Mark
I think it was around $200.
Great job! Nice and appealing design.
looks good, can you share what plugin you are using for your photo collage on the homepage…thx
Congrats on your launch and doing an excellent job at outsourcing the work. I tend to try to do it all so development progresses at a snail’s pace. Regarding Bahama cruises eventually you’ll want to offer more specifics on itineraries offered by various cruise lines, time in port, shore excursions, etc.
@ Leonard
That’s the plan :). Hopefully I will be able to accomplish that with a travel affiliate.
Great job! Looking forward to watching the progression.
Great, clean site, Eliot. The best of luck!
Looking good Elliot. You have one of my favorite .COs that I have seen thus far. Looking forward to the evolution of the site.
Nice website good luck for your new venture, hope you get well rank with a .co also SEO and social will be a huge work.
Great job, Elliot, wishing you much successes with it, as it will eventually spread to all of us struggling domainers!
I had just finished work on my new long-tailed domain that I’m readying for Christmas: http://www.thewebsiteforchristmas.com
Any feedback will be much appreciated, thanks all.
@don, the plugin is a flash based called cu3er.
I love your site Elliot. Its very fresh and crisp. Im looking forward to hearing the seo and traffic due to it being a .co! Invested quite a lot on it as well 🙂
Nice, beautiful, very clean website. What engine do you use for your sites? How do you integrate them with such affiliate programs like amazon?
@ Alex
I am using WordPress, and I haven’t integrated any affiliate programs yet.
@ Don
Ace is right… it’s a part of the Los Angeles theme, although I paid an extra $49 so it wasn’t branded with the Cu3er logo.
Thanks everyone for the feedback.
Cu3er works in Safari and Firefox but has trouble in IE, why would you use?
I get some scrip errors in IE 8. Also, flash takes too long to load, I would go for animated gif or optimize the flash so it doesn’t take that long. Template is ok, still looks like any other wordpress site. Footer has some css issues.
But overall good job 🙂
Great start.
I have a question, how hard do you think it is to seamlessly integrate the aff programs in this template /CMS? Also can you do a ‘normal’ upgrade when WP fixes bugs or does that require code changes? I am thinking of using this for a few projects so excuse the questions.
Hello Elliot
I look forward to hearing how Bahamas.co develops. I am carrying out a similar experiment with my newly-launched .co site: http://www.musicgames.co
It has only been up for a couple of days, so I am getting nothing from the search engines yet. Am planning to get on the first page of searches for “music games’ – around 800,000 such searches are made each month (according to my research) and if I can get a decent proportion of those I will be happy!
Alex
Nice and elegant, fits well the purpose of the werbsite – congratulations. The carrousel of pictures on the top is well done too.
Only one small suggestion: an ad for Netsol on the top of the page seems to be a weird choice, since the website is meant for holiday-makers, not for domainers. Or maybe it is just meant for filling the space in a beta version? I would rather recommend to make a deal for a banner with some firm in the travel business.
At last a developed .co, this will boost the market of the .co significantly I expect specially that the owner is Elliot 😉
Now we can really sit back and see how much the market will accept the .co after the launch of Bahamas.co
Thanks Elliot. And thank you for turning me on to Epik which is launching 4 dot co geo directories with me this month. Anyone who has invested in .co should follow your lead to boost the value of the extension. You cannot do all the heavy lifting!
Hi Elliot. Congrats on site launch.
I really admire your methodical approach to website building.
From domain name acquisition, to logo design, to content creation, website conception, and finally the most important marketing and monetization. You are a great project manager and a calculated risk taker entrepreneur.
Do you have a groupie signup area.? 🙂 I am not gay and I am not star struck or anything. I just wish I can watch over your shoulder for a couple of weeks while you work.
you might want to extend the black footer area as some of the text in your footer runs off it onto the white background below it.
also, curious, but you may or may not want to divulge, what is the total budget you’ve spent thus far to get the site where it is at now?
also, nice pic on the restaurant page!
Great info, thanks for the references, now i am using their logo designer and also ordered wordpress website as a temporary website. great info for all the developers. I really liked the article hint, i just outsourced 10 articles for that new website for super cheap. Cant beat that.
Hi there Elliot.
Just wondering how Bahamas.co was coming on. What kind of traffic are you getting? Have you borken even yet? 😉
I am currently building out some .co domains (not competitive to this site – don’t know what others you have) and finding it hard to get traction. Trying to find out if it’s something I have not done….
Thanks
Lee