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View Full Version : Hyperlocal News - A Good Example?



rob
05-05-12, 07:35 PM
I hope it is ;)

http://www.wrexham.com/news/wrexham-votes-live-updates-6673.html

Local election coverage from a hyperlocal I am building out - also opened a 'news desk (http://www.wrexham.com/news/wrexhamcoms-town-centre-office-opens-6613.html)' for it (this isnt me in the pic btw!):
http://www.wrexham.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/wrexham-newsdeak-wrexham-pc-repair-500x373.jpg

Interested to get feedback on the site design, look and feel, plus general direction to it - or any other ideas that may come to mind!

Edwin
05-05-12, 08:21 PM
It's a very impressive site - have you found there are enough advertisers in town to support the kind of operation you're building up behind the site, long-term? I'm curious as I'll readily confess I really don't know anything about Wrexham at all.

rob
05-05-12, 10:24 PM
Hopefully!

It ought to be self sustainable in around 5-6 months.

I know you see it as proper work, and high cost as news etc, as do I but I am seeing it as something to spin out and run itself. A test of that theory as well :)

Edwin
06-05-12, 08:22 AM
I hope you'll continue to provide updates from time to time. It should be fascinating to watch as you bring on the additional services, such as classifieds. Presumably if you ramp things up to the point where it's self-sustaining, you can then tackle other nearby towns (since a lot of larger advertisers tend to be regional with several offices/branches around a particular area).

rob
06-05-12, 10:37 AM
Classifieds were due to be up already :-)

I will do updates!

Mojoco
06-05-12, 12:48 PM
Rob,

I'm getting:

"error establishing a database connection"

rob
06-05-12, 02:11 PM
Sods law a table had crashed then cached !

Ought to be ok now :)

GreyWing
07-05-12, 11:41 AM
Thing is Rob, done correctly with Facebook integration etc, very little percentage of your traffic should come from Google. We have a similar site and because of the way we have ours set up, around 15% comes from Google, even though we are second or first on ours. Most of our traffic comes from facebook and twitter, so much so that I tend to ban Google from scraping our site.

But nice to have a site that does not rely on google and ironically if people can't find the site on google they may start looking elsewhere. Which solves the problem others are complaining about on other sites. So on mine (similar to yours), Google needs me more than I need it and it goes back to what I was saying late last year. I will never ever build a business (costs - outgoings) around the traffic the top one channel provider sends me.

rob
08-05-12, 12:24 PM
Exactly :)

I had google shut me down many years ago on some large scale amazon stuff, and ever since then I dont focus on them .

I am guessing panda/penguin/other wooly named updates to google will be peoples awakening to that !!