Structuring my new website

I am currently in Thailand taking a little bit of a break, but also spending some time on my new travel website. I am still thinking exactly what I want to do with the site.

I decided to use Joomla as the CMS for the site. I was thinking about Drupal at first, but after spending a little bit of time with it, I eventually went back to Joomla. I found it difficult to find good themes for Drupal, like what you can get with Joomla. Drupal is probably more flexible and powerful, but Joomla is a little easier to get a site up and running, in my opinion.

I am using a theme from Joomlart. The theme has an online newspaper look. At first, I couldn’t get anything to work. The documentation for it isn’t great, but once you play around with it for a while, it is not too hard. They have a great support forum, who helped me with a couple of small problems I had.

I want to make user reviews a large part of the site, and Joomla has a great review extension, which I think looks very professional and is fairly easy to set up. I would also like to add property listings later on and again Joomla has some good extensions for this.

I wanted to add a blog to the site and could have done it within Joomla, but you just can’t beat wordpress for this. I imported my old travel site entries into the site and redirected the old site to the new domain. I want to also eventually set up a forum on the site and will probably go with Vbulletin. There are bridges available to link users to Joomla, but to keep it all simple, I might just keep them separate.

I am getting a little bit of traffic now to the site and starting to build links. Travel bloggers are a friendly bunch of people and seem to happily exchange links. I am already ranking for “asia travel guide” which at least is a start.

My goal is to eventually be able to hire some writers to produce content for the site, but that could be a while off yet.

How is the economic downturn affecting you?

I arrived in Bangkok last night and now planning to stay in Thailand for at least the next month or so. After my passport/visa nightmare, it feels good to have a brand new passport and the freedom to go where I want.

The flight from Melbourne was full of holiday makers. It was a discount airline, but it made me wonder how the impact of the economic crisis is having on people’s spending decisions. Perhaps the holiday makers “downgraded” their travel plans from the US or Europe and opted for a cheaper trip to Thailand.

For me, interest rates are down, the Australian dollar is down and my income is so far unaffected. Being a property investor and making most of my money in US dollars, I am currently better off. Rental rates are set to increase in Australia as they suffer a shortage of rental properties – all good things for property investors (as long as you are not forced to sell).

It is hard to know how internet businesses will be affected. Some people suggest that some companies might even increase spending on their PPC campaigns, as it can be more targeted and cheaper form of advertising, than traditional media. I imagine there will be less money going around for new internet startups that don’t have proven revenue models.

It was funny to see economists saying how they “predicted” the crisis. The stock market, gas prices and property values, were going out of control, I don’t think it takes a genius to see what was happening.

Just as a former Australian treasurer Paul Keating once said, “It’s a recession we had to have”.

Choosing a domain for my next site

Most people starting a new business or website, spend quite a bit of time brainstorming names for their business. Even if it is an offline business, you will probably still need to check if the .com is available. No point naming your business, only to find the .com is being used by a less than savory website.

When selecting a domain to register, you can choose between a keyword rich name, or use words that are catchy but unrelated to your business. Lonelyplanet for example doesn’t mention travel, but is a catchy and easy to remember name. Or you can even make up a new word (Yahoo) or vary the spelling of an existing word (Google).

Google’s search engine seems to place some weight on the domain name, so if you are looking to get traffic from search engines, it is a good idea to select a keyword-rich domain, ie. the keywords you want your site to rank for. The other advantage of a keyword-rich domain, is that when people link to your website, they use the name of your site as the anchor text. As we know, this is one of the best ways to build rankings in Google.

I also prefer to get a .com and not have any hyphens in the name. For this project, I was prepared to buy a domain that had previously been registered, but was available for sale. This usually means that you need to pay a bit more than the usual $10 registration fee. If you are serious about your site, I think getting a good name is a good investment. Why build your business around a .net for example, only to lose traffic to people typing in .com.

Anyway, I decided on the name asiatravelguide.com. No guessing as to what the site will be about!

I am going to continue writing about how I plan to develop and market the site. Next I will probably write about the CMS (content management system) I am running.