In April I bought my first ever "smartphone" - Android phone with Dual SIM... It actully has WI-Fi router built in and in days I have no "ground" Wi-FI I can use Mobile Internet to connect to my laptop. Anyway - I'm very satisfied with my first Android phone.
I must admit I'm using phone for it's sole purpose - to call, but that has changed - with my new Android phone - I'm using few apps on it (Google Adsense, Google Analytics, some news apps and Instagram).
Some already probably knwo - I'm an expat in Georgia (South Caucasus), when I first arrived here, more than 3 years ago. I arrived already with an aim - to build Travel site for Georgia. Since I didn't know anything about this amazing country - I decided this will be amazing expierience. To put my Drupal knoweldge together with something exciting - exploring a new country from A-Z.
I wanted to build something fancy, something cool - I wanted to build kinda a Lonely Planet site for Georgia alone. I believe I created a really good job in terms of site architecture. Site involved complex structure, it used XML feeds to Parse Flickr, Wikipedia, it had geotagged content attached to almost every node. Everything was cool - except, the content sucked.
It was some copy/pasted (Scrapped) content from Wikipedia, Flickr and other sites. Why? Because all the big sites do this. At that time I didn't realize importance of providing unique and valuable content. I was of my goal - to build a site about MY expierience in Georgia.
At start it kinda worked - the site started to receive so important traffic from Google, but it never reahed more than 2000 unique visitors a month, and finally when I did something wrong with site building stuff - the site dissapeared at all from search engine.
Then I realized, that content is still a king - no matter how cool and fancy is your site architecture, no matter how complex and agile is your site - without actual visitors it's worht of nothing.
I spent some money on buying Facebook bussines page likes and I did spend some money to boost my posts on Facebook page to drive traffic to that cool site. It worked great - but after boost - again - silence. It's not worth of money invested.
And then - I realized -hey, I have my new Android phone - I will Instagram places in Georgia and then I will write a review of those places and put back on Tourgeorgia - and I did it.
Tourgeorgia.eu - 5.0 was born.
Screenshot of Tourgeorgia.eu desktop version
This time site is made with simple blog structure, it is cathegorized with few categories, also there still is some serious engine under the hood, and I do already have few ideas to implement on site in close future. One of the ideas is to add - raitings for each place, and second is to add location data and map using gmap. This time I'm not rushing - visitors first, is my new thining, and then, only then - some fancy complex systems.
I have not forgoten about mobile visitors as well - and built a responsive design for site as well:
Tourgeorgia.eu mobile version
As of today (it's about one month the site is rebranded from scratch) - there is about 230 unique visitors to this site, and it contains about 30 articles.