WhyWeDidIt
From Trackpedia
Contents |
Why we did it
John and I started attending driving schools at tracks in 2005, John had done one the year before also. We looked around the web and couldn't find one place that had information on tracks, hotels, track notes, links to schools, forums on discussing tracks, safety information, check lists, what to expect, rookie information, the list goes on.
We could find bulletin board type sites which had lots of information but the information was diluted in forum type conversations. You had to spend a lot of time pulling the right info from this conversations and often, it was hard to sort the good stuff from the bad stuff. Forums are not suited to getting an overview of a subject, the information is too distributed.
So, we decided to make a new web site that could give us what we wanted. The result was Trackpedia.com. We now have a site where for each track, we can find track maps, track notes, videos of people driving the track, hotels, and any other information that the community finds useful.
Wiki
I'd been using a wiki at IBM, twiki but wasn't happy with it. I'd played around with Mediawiki and seen it at wikipedia and decided that could be what we need to make consolidated content. We follow the various bulletin boards, reading the various 'experts' sound off, answer newbie questions and we'd talked with people at the track days we'd attended. So, a wiki looks like a great way to provide content on tracks, safety, checklists etc in a way that the community could extend and contribute to. So, we registered our domain name at namesecure.com and then I installed the wiki. We'd a couple of problems installing it related to mysql but it only took an hour or so.
We then started adding track notes and having a structure. The wiki is currently free format but this is becoming a problem to maintain. We've around 150 in the wiki now and when we want to change the look or add sections to those tracks, it's now becoming a chore. We're looking in to using maybe JoNAS or something to organise the track information and make it easier to change the look and feel.
We're in the process of adding RSS feeds with upcoming track days using CARP and we're also adding google maps and google maps should let us do lots of cool stuff with the info.
Forums
We used vbulletin for our forum software, this was very easy to install and we paid for it. We had to integrate sign on from both the wiki and vbulletin so that we'd a single user database. It's still not 100% percent but it works well.
Advertising
We tried kanoodle, google adsense and comission junction. So far, we're not happy with any of them. Kanoodle couldn't place reasonable ads on our site so we gave up on that quickly. Google adsense seems good at picking ads but occasionally screws up (horse lovers anyone?).
Commission junction we're still not sure about. The thing we're sure of is that unless we can get banner ads from advertisers contacting us directly, we'll never make much from the site. We had gotten adbutler working. This is a 10 buck a month banner hosting service. We are now just trying to recruit advertisers to place banners on the sites or sponsor certain pages with directed adverts to help pay the bills.
We're also noticing that people that visit the site regularly don't really click on ads. It's the incidental traffic from search engines. It seems people just searching for stuff are around 20x more likely to click on an ad than people who regularly visit the site. Early days yet for predictions like this but it seems to be the case.
We had a lot of trouble being indexed in by google. MSN picked us up quickly but google didn't. The reason seems to be mediawiki was using what they call ugly URLs for our pages. The URLs looks like a form submission, example: mysite?title=Hello.
Google doesn't like these at all. We fixed this towards the end of Feb 06 using mod rewrite rules to convert from a google friendly URL like www.trackpedia.com/wiki/Lime_Rock to the real URL www.trackpedia.com/w/index.php?title=Lime_Rock. This seems to have helped with google almost immediately so we're starting to get search traffic finally now.
Open source and php
The availability of open source software is the only reason this site is working. It's cheap to host and lots of very stable stuff is out there. It's actually eye opening as we work for IBM on the J2EE application server. This stuff is real easy to install, integrate together, extend and it seems basically bulletproof. We only choose packages with big communities and which were in use on big sites so maybe we're lucky but so far it's working well. We'll be contributing our extensions back to mediawiki once we get the kinks worked out.
PHP is very easy to use and the packages we're using like mediawiki and vbulletin are easy to extend. Footprint wise, it's tiny compared with the normal J2EE stack. The time to install is pretty amazing as both packages are very easy to install and bootstrap on either our home computers using xampp or on our managed host servers.
Legal stuff
We started an LLC to own all the sites and receive and ad revenue that we receive. It also helps in case someone tries to sue us.
Summary
So, we're two months old and so far, we're doing well in our opinion. We're starting to build a community and the community is now starting to contribute content. It's satisfying to see that we have a global community already. South Africa is a big audience for us as is Europe. Obviously, the US and Canada are the bulk of our audience but, the rest of the globe is there also.
We're extending the site to do motor bike tracks and go karting over the next couple of months and it's actually looking promising. If we were starting our track days again then I think we'd be very happy to have found this site on the web.