Bahamas.CO is Launched

Elliot Silver
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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.

Fred Mercaldo & Scottsdale.com Announces New Developments and Enhancements for Popular “City In The Box” Software Solution

Elliot Silver
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I just received some news and updates from Fred Mercaldo about his company’s “City in the Box” software platform, and I want to share it with you. If you’ve been thinking about working with the company, now is the time to seriously consider it. (This is not a paid advertisement nor am I being compensated in any way for writing this or if you sign up.)

My website, Burbank.com, has been on the platform for a couple of months now, and traffic continues to be solid and advertisers keep asking for information and creating business listings. The sales process is set to begin in about two weeks, and I am very excited about the prospects.

The company has three big announcements today:

  • They have added Laramie.com and SanMateo.com to their upcoming development projects, bringing the number of City.com properties using their software platform to 55.
  • Scottsdale.com has entered into an exclusive partnership with ZogMedia to provide SEO supervision for all of their partner sites.   They have also added FaceBook and Twitter applications/features to City In The Box.
  • There will be a price increase, effective November 1st or once an additional 25 City.com properties contract with them for development, whichever comes first, from $12,500 to $16,500.

According to Fred Mercaldo,

“With all of the features City In The Box delivers, and with a decided trend towards developing rather than parking, it has never been a better time to take advantage of our services. We are arguably not only the best priced software solution available today, but also the most reliable and widely used, and it is a system built for monetization.

You get a complete business directory for your City, and by selling Premium Upgraded Listings, along with Category Partnerships, combined with our easy to use Content Management System, you are ready to go to market on Day One. Tons of unique content, Calendar of Events section, custom logo and color schemes, professional SEO, and much more are included. And in cases where after launch you need Advertising and Marketing services, we will do this for you thru our CitiesPlanet program!”

For further information, visit CityInTheBox.com and CitiesPlanet.com. A brief PDF overview can be downloaded on the City in the Box website. You can also send Fred an email at fred@scottsdale.com.

Saturday Morning Snipets

Elliot Silver
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Looks like it’s going to be a super hot day in the City today, so I am getting out of town and going to sit by the pool and drink margaritas or beers or something cold. If you post comments or email me today (or tomorrow), I will probably be very slow to reply, so my apologies in advance.

I was in a bar room brawl last Saturday and ended up tearing ligaments and breaking my pinky, so it’s been a bit difficult to write this week.   If you think that’s bad, you should have seen the girl I beat up. Only kidding about the brawl. I did the finger damage when I dropped a football pass on the beach, but the bar fight makes for a better story.

Anyway, on to some updates:

– I finally had the chance to meet my web designer (Mike McAlister) in person in New York City yesterday after 3 years of working together. The ironic thing is that despite never meeting face to face before, it felt just like old times when we got together. It’s cool getting to meet someone you’ve known for years but haven’t met before.

– Snooki should have registered the .com domain name before announcing that she’s writing a “Snooktionary” to help “Jersey Shore” viewers understand what she is saying on the hit television show. A guy in Pennsylvania registered Snooktionary.com on August 6th, the day the book was publicly revealed.

– If you are thinking about going away on a last minute trip this summer, you might want to think about attending the Traffic conference in Dublin in a couple weeks. It can be written off as a business expense, Aer Lingus is offering summer travel deals, and Rick Latona has always said if money is an issue he would try to work something out.   There are also some cool domain investors who live in that area and will probably be at the conference.

– People always seem to be interested in learning what new names I’ve acquired recently, so here goes.   In the aftermarket in the last week or so, I bought NassauHotels.com, ChiliFest.com (to go along with TequilaFest.com and ChampagneFest.com), DrugAdvertising.com, FloatingStorage.com, and WarStrategy.com.

– Totally unrelated to business, but does anyone have a recommendation or two for wine tasting in the Napa Valley (not going to Sonoma this trip)? We’re going out to San Francisco next week and are making a trip to Napa on Saturday.   We plan to visit Stagg’s Leap, Qunitessa, and Artesa, but have time for one or two additional stops.   Any suggestions?

Logo Selected & Template Chosen

Elliot Silver
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With the deadline for launching Bahamas.CO looming, I have selected the winning entry in a logo competition held on 99 Designs. Not only was the chosen logo my favorite of all submission, but it was also the leading vote getter in the poll I set up with the final designs. I feel like the colors, font, and graphic design elements are perfect for the website.

Although I wasn’t aware of it before determining the winner, the logo designer is a person that the domain investment community knows quite well – Theo Delevegas. Theo and I have not always seen eye to eye on certain things in the past, but I do respect his opinions. I also believe he is a talented designer, and this marks the second logo he has designed for me (ActingCoach.com is the first).

I also selected the template I plan to use as a base for the new website. It’s going to be modified to meet my needs, but I found something I like on ThemeForest.net. It will be a WordPress-based website to make it easier for me to update it, add plugins, and make changes as the site grows (both in content and traffic). Hopefully my designer will be able to make these changes for me, but if not, I will post an RFP on eLance.com.

At first, there will be somewhere around 50 articles, and I plan to continue to add content to the site. Down the road when Google has the site indexed and traffic is at a solid level, I plan to integrate a booking widget using WCTravel or IAN.com. This will help maximize revenue and will create a relationship with visitors, helping to build the Bahamas.CO brand. By no means will this be a mini site.

Anyway, things are progressing quite well, and if all goes as planned, I should be able to launch the site very soon. One of the best parts of this project will be another Bahamas trip.

Steps to Building Out Bahamas.co

Elliot Silver
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Just a quick   evening post to let you know where I am at with the development of Bahamas.co and the steps I’ve taken so far. I want to show you how development doesn’t have to be time consuming.

1) Posted a coming soon page on Bahamas.co and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. It’s nothing fancy, but I figured that I might as well put up a placeholder for now. As you can see, it’s already been indexed in Google.

2) Held a logo design contest on 99Designs.   I invited some designers I thought did quality work, and others participated as well. Hey – why don’t you take a minute and vote for your favorite logo?

3) Found a few templates I like on ThemeForest.net, which will be modified and customized to my liking. I don’t have much time to get the site live, so the custom option is going to have to wait. I plan to have a travel search function eventually, but for now a template is going to have to suffice.

4) Did some research to see what people are looking to find when looking for information about the Bahamas and wrote down a list of article topics. There are roughly 40 article topics in total.

5) I posted a job listing on eLance asking for writers to create a proposal for the aforementioned articles, which will need to be sent to me within 2 weeks. All articles need to be custom written and come from at least 2+ sources (with citations in the event there’s ever an issue). I then selected the most cost effective proposal.

One I have the articles written for me, the logo chosen, and the template modified, I will begin the time consuming process of loading the articles onto the site. I will then build a XML sitemap, submit it to Yahoo and Bing, and hopefully start gaining some traction.

At the beginning of 2010, I promised myself there wouldn’t be any additional development projects this year. Having the opportunity to build and own Bahamas.co was too good to pass up, and it is going to launch in a couple of weeks.

Learn About Epik & Rob Monster in Today’s Webcast

Elliot Silver
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Rob Monster is one of the most approachable people in the domain space, and I think his company has a good business model that may work for some domain investors. Epik just launched BumperProtectors.com this morning for my company, and as I promised, I will keep you apprised of the results in a future post.

For now though, I would like to remind you that Rob will be taking part in a free webcast this afternoon at 2pm EST (approximately 2 hours from now). The purpose is to learn more about Epik and Rob, and to learn how their services may be able to help you develop your domain names, as I did with BumperProtectors.com.

You need to sign up prior to the webcast to participate, so you might want to do that ASAP. I am sure this webcast will be available at a later point if you can’t make it or have other things going on, but you’ll want to check it out, especially if you’ve never connected with Rob before.

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