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What would you do? Or turning a website into a business.

3 points by IanMechura ↗ HN
A couple months ago I was approached by a good friend (we will call him Sam) who was taking a job with a large company with strict IP rules. Sam owned a free classifieds website that he had been maintaining for years but he needed to get rid of it due to the IP rules at his new company. So I purchased it in full for a very nominal amount of money.

The site is located at http://www.frimp.net and it currently has 5k registered users, 17000 postings and 25-30k hits per month. The current operational costs are about 45.00 per month. It is not stellar but I was thinking it was better than starting from scratch.

Does the community at large have any words of advice or suggestions on how to turn this web site into something valuable?

It is written in Java/Spring and I am about 75% through with a rewrite of the existing functionality in python/django.

Any help will be very much appreciated.

6 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] thread
veb
Better UI.
IanMechura
This is a secret... but... Here is a very, very rough version of the new UI.
jayzee
It is such a secret that we cant even see it?!
IanMechura
Yes, top secret... lol

Here is a link to my prototype: http://www.thesaverssecret.com/

One think I forgot to mention is that this website has very good rankings in google for the following terms:

online yard sale - #1 online garage sale - #3 online sale - #4

veb
Honestly. Your best bet would be to get a designer to design it for you, rather than use something that reeks of a template.

Best way I've found when working with designers, is to sketch exactly what you think it should look like. Include colors or themes (from pictures if you can) and then draw some sort of 'mascot', like a cuddly animal, or a lightbulb. This gives the designer most bits of the puzzle, which in turn allows them to (more easily) design you a unique website.