The GulfCommunity Blog

A Reluctant Change of Plans

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 06:00:00 GMT

I recall the original concept for GulfCommunity.com was born in late 2003 after a rough trip to a local restaurant. Food poising coupled with bad service from a local establishment led me to want to create a non-biased, uncommercialized place on the internet where locals could scold poor performing businesses and more importantly share stories of positive service experiences. I fired up my work notebook one evening, worked through the night and had a rudimentary site published within a few days.

Along the way, it was always my intention to keep from "Selling Out", as it were. The web space was cheap or free and my cost of ownership for the site was limited to annual domain fees and occasional expenses related to adding features or changing the page layout. Some friends and I posted on local forums, announcing the new site and quickly a group of fun locals began to populate the forums and an online community was born.

I recognized the need to provide content aside from the various user-driven content methods such as the forums, so I made calls to Gulf Coast Newspapers, the Mobile Press Register and the local TV stations. Some, never returned my calls, others were locked in content arrangements with sites such as Al.com (a great site, btw) while others wanted a small forture to syndicate their content through our site.

In keeping with the "Build it and they will come" mentality, I continued to add features to the site. A family-locator during Katrina, a Gas-locator during Ivan, free blogs, free classifieds, free photo galleries. The features stacked up but somewhere along the line the community of friends that frequented our forums, sadly grew apart from one another. The hit counts went from hundreds a day down to hundreds a week.

Frustrated, I set out to provide advertising. Billboards, radio advertising, movie theater ads are all $600-$1200 a month with minimum contract requirements - all hard to reach for a budding community portal with no budget.
I invested in newspaper advertising, supporting the very entities with whom I received a cold shoulder, dabbled in print advertising and finally in google placements. All brought the hit counts up but not to the site's potential.

In the meantime, I watch major media entities, many of whom were too good to talk to me or who ignored our press releases, steal our ideas and use them on their own sites. Weak.

So, this month, I've decided to open gulfcommunity.com to public advertising. I've found an interim solution to the local content needs that provides links to valid local stories without violating terms of usage for those sites. Our hitcounts are still respectable but the site hasn't reach the full potential, especially considering it's been here for 6 years. I've decided to open up the gulfcommunity pages to sponsorship with local businesses. I believe we can provide tasteful marketing at a much more reasonable price than the other guys and in the meantime, the funds from those ads will go towards advertising campaigns aimed at raising awareness of this site and it's services.

This is something we should have done a long time ago but the altruistic drive of not splattering ads throughout the site was hard to overcome!
Have a great Christmas and amazing New year!
Bill Dodd

Founder, GulfCommunity.Com

New Year, More Cool Stuff

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

To ring in the new year, we have some exciting new things in store. Here's what's coming this month.

1/15/2006

GulfCommunity.Com Email
Starting this month, we will begin offering free email accounts, powered by Google's Gmail. You will recieve a 2gb email account with all of the features of Gmail, in the format of somename@gulfcommunity.com. You can choose to use your new email account from your favorite email software or through our branded webmail interface. Initially we are limited to a few hundred accouts so get yours quickly. If you are interested in a gulfcommunity.com email account, you can learn more about it, here.

GulfSpace
In the site survey, many the second and third most popular entries were photo-sharing and family sites. Enter: gulfspace. Think myspace with a local flavor. It's free, and it's coming this month. Create your own profile to share your interests, hobbies and pictures with friends or use it to network with colleagues.

Coming Next Month, we will be adding:

Real Estate - List your house for sale, for free. With pictures and all the text you care to use.

Business Directory and Reviews - Fly in your soup? Tell the gulf coast.

GulfCommunity.Com Site Changes

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 06:00:00 GMT

Hiya All,

I appreciate the feedback recieved over the last few weeks and I was excited about the results of the recent Press Release - Gulf Coast Web Portal Hopes to Aid in Post-Hurricane Community Information Sharing. From what I'm told the Press Release was picked up around 50,000 times by media outlets and online news readers. Unfortunately, the resulting membership increase was less than stellar but we will continue to push forward nontheless.

This week & last, we've added a few more features from the old site including:

Community Sound Off
Community Gas Locator
NOAA Hurricane Tracking Feed
Real-time Chat

Next week we are working to add enhancements to forums and blogging so that topics from the forums and blogs can appear on other parts of the side (read: homepage) as well as information about becoming a local sponsor.

Also last week, we began to advertise via Google Adwords and are now showing Google Adsense advertising on select pages in hope to raise money that we can use to drive additional traffic to the site.

As always we appreciate your support and hope that you enjoy our little online community.

Best Wishes,

Bill

GulfCommunity.Com: The Story

Tue, 30 May 2006 05:00:00 GMT

It’s funny how motivation can come from the most unlikely places. In February of 2004 I remember experiencing a number of disheartening experiences with local businesses. One was a case where practically my whole family got food poisoning from the same restaurant. After recovering, we called the restaurant, not wanting free food but wanting them to be aware that a problem may exist so that they may take action. I was greeted with a general indifference. I believe the words spoken where “So, what do you want me to do about it?” The problems continued, be it myself, my family or my friends, everywhere I looked people were being slighted in some way by contractors, doctors, their employers (my employer) and even church-affiliates. Aware that these hassles are present in everyone’s lives, I recall sitting at dinner one day wishing that I could do something to give people a voice to share positive and negative experiences about local businesses. Whether poor service at a restaurant or some retail associate going the extra mile, I felt giving people an outlet to tell their stories would be both intriguing and beneficial to the community.

Three months later, GulfCommunity.Com was born. With support from my professional affiliates and friends and through the use of open source software and highly caffeinated drinks I was able to put GulfCommunity.Com online with $0 invested. This was made especially possible thanks to my good friend at Coastal Security Solutions. My friends and I posted messages on forums announcing the new site on http://www.wkrg.com, www.al.com, and other local-topiced forums and soon the site hits went from 20 a day to 200 a day. A small community of fun people began using the forums and the ideas began to pour in.

Soon we added the domains www.baldwincounty.com and www.baldwincounty.net. We purchased classifieds and job posting software, wrote resume listing software and considerable quantities of additional caffeine was consumed. GulfCommunity.Com now receieved over a thousand hits a day with still only a small group of posters writing about nearly anything you could imagine in our forums.

Life was good. GulfCommunity generated $0 in revenue but the costs of running the site were limited to the cost of caffeinated drinks and a huge IOU bill to our friends at CSSI. No salaries, no brick-and-morter buildings, no advertising costs. Just lots of $0's on both sides of the ledger.

Then something happened. The forum regulars dwindled to minimum. Those left, eventually bored with chatting with themselves online realized they could also chat with themselves anywhere.

During the hurricane season, hoping to be of service to the community and to rekindle activity, I posted tools for hurricane tracking and gas location.

No one cared. No one used them.

On March 1st, 2006 - GulfCommunity.Com received 0 hits. Not even a curious bot looking to update search indexes. 0 hits.

Being it's creator, I had never intended on building something that would require constant upkeep and had easily moved onto other things. (An overworked, underpaid job that I eventually got wise and left, for one)

On May 1st, 2006 after a painful experience trying to explain rudimentary tech principles to an outsourced, non-english speaking technician hired by a local Internet Provider I found myself wondering if someone else in our community had similar problems with the company. I googled for among other things, "(that ISP name here) sucks" and the second result was none other than a post to the forums of GulfCommunity.Com.

Even though I never quite met my goal of creating an online system for people to rate their business experiences (yet), it seems my little community-oriented site, in the end - achieved what I set out for it to do for none other than me.

So, I decided it was time to pour a little more effort into GulfCommunity.Com. The result is what you see today. A new look and feel, some old features and some new ones. The changes, more than anything else -- will allow me to create more content areas or buy additional features to plugin to this little online community. It ain't perfect and it never will be but I'll continue to add features and it's up to you whether or not you decide to use them. I can't create the content for the whole site but I can certainly provide a playground and hope that if I build it "they will come."

I invite you to tell your friends and spread the word.. This site is here for you to use, make it what you will.

Bill Dodd