New Project – Baby Names website

I will add more later, but I wanted to show off my new project: Baby Name Clusters.

Guestbook entries

We have a physical guestbook located in the house, and I have finally typed in all of our guests’ comments. I have posted them as a page in this blog, and also using the VRBO associated guestbook (which is not very pretty, but people use it a lot when browsing via VRBO). I’m honored by the comments, and I’m glad that everybody is enjoying the place!

Ads running: VRBO, craigslist, google

Alright, now that the website for the rental is live, its time to get some guests! I spent some time comparing the big vacation rental websites, and found that VRBO seems to still be the biggest destination out there. Some of the other sites have nicer search interfaces, and look more modern, but vrbo still gets most of the traffic. For the Seattle area, they had about 80 rentals, while the other sites had less than half of that number. Maybe if people start renting and liking our place, then we can expand to the other places as well.

To get the ad running on VRBO, I had to decide how high up on the list to go. The way you get higher on the default list is to post more photos, and they charge you a base rate of $179/year plus $24/year for each additional photo. beyond the 3 included photos. They also have a nice little table which shows you how many photos you need in order to get higher in the list. Here are the values from that text table in a chart. You can see that the more you pay per year, the higher your ad placement. I chose 4 pictures, in order to get me about halfway up the list. From there, it didn’t seem worth the extra money to get higher. Maybe if this turns out to be a success I can pay more money to increase the prestige of the place.

As for google adwords, I made a text ad and decided to pay a decent amount per click for the first couple weeks, with a moderate daily budget (about $5) for some popluar keywords like “seattle vacation rental,” until I start getting bookings. I’ll turn that down in a couple weeks.

Finally, I posted an ad on one of my favorite sites: craigslist. I just grabbed an excerpt from my main web page and put it in the ad with a link back to my web page.

Maybe in a week, I’ll see where (or if) I get more traffic and bookings!

Main website now up

The main Seattle Duck House website is now up. I spent about 8 hours getting the text written and images all set up. We picked a nice “logo” image from a search of creative commons licensed photos at flickr for mallard duck and found a great close-up photo taken by Mike Baird.

I “bought” the domain name on April 12: it is actually free when you keep the site hosted at Microsoft Office Live. They will also pay for the annual renewals. As far as I can tell, the only catch is that they put a Live Search bar in the upper left and a tiny Office Live logo in lower right. There are no ads anywhere – so it still looks very clean and professional.

Why did I pick MS Office Live? Well, I’ve always tended to cheer for the underdogs, especially when they are the home team… So, I decided to see what they had to offer – especially since it was free. I have plenty of experience writing HTML from scratch, and I’ve even tried a few other domain name and hosting services (notably godaddy.com). This is far better and easier, and I don’t feel like they’re trying to suck more and more purchases out of me.

It turns out that it really nicely integrates mail, domain name picking, website design, and web statistics. Most of the features only work with IE (but the Office Live Mail works fine on Firefox). The web design interface at Office Live was actually very pleasant and intuitive. There were a few quirky things here and there, but overall, I’ve been very pleased about the service. I can’t complain when its free. But, in reality, there’s not much to complain about for hosting a static website.