Name of your website?UnicyclePics | Mountain Unicycling
Your name?
Peter Stewart
Your Location (city, etc)
Macclesfiels, Cheshire
When did you start your website and why?
I set up Unicyclepics just under three years ago. The reason I set it up was simple, I love unicycling and know lots of people around the wold who also love unicycling and looking at new other people unicycling and doing new tricks. I originally set it up as a picture archive, but over the years I've been learning PHP and have now made the site completely dynamic, with user accounts and Picture Voting.
Please give us a short summary of your website, business model, etc
I don't really have a business model as such, unicyclepics is a non-profit site, in fact it actually cost me around £100 a year to hosting not including the hundreds of hours it's taken me to create the site... But I have recently been designing Unicycle T-shirt which I will be selling from my site withing the next few weeks.
What has been the most difficult part of creating and running your website?
hmmm well, that's a tricky question, non of it has been easy. I would probably say the change from HTML to PHP was the most challenging task, but also promoting the site is a lot of work, trying to get good positions in search engines and thinking of new things to keep users coming back. Out of all the PHP code I've done I would say the dynamic archive and number navigation was the most challenging.
What has been the easist part of operating your website?
Buying the domain name. simple.. :) cost me £7 and I haven't looked back since.
What was your biggest mistake?
my biggest mistake was probably not buying the ".com" domain when I got the ".co.uk" around a year ago someone else bought unicyclepics.com and started setting up a site doing exactly what my site does. This was short lived, and after a month or two his site was taken down.
Who maintains your website and why?
I maintain my site, I have a lot of input from riders around the world, but I do all the coding, advertising, graphics and more. I am planing on setting up administrator account for some of the top riders so they can do write ups and so on, but I've not had the time recently to get this up and running.
Tell us how your business has benefitted from your website?
Unfortunately as I said before my site is non-profit and is not a business. so no benefits as of yet, I would eventually like to become a distributer of unicycle, and sell my unicycle T-Shirts off my site.
What are your views on ecommerce and the future of the internet?
I think ecommerce in the future will be the way everyone shops, and the internet will be more prolific than physical shopping centers. in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the internet already has the edge over shopping centers..
What are your views on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
My view on SEO is that if you want a popular easy to find website SEO is vital! You will not be found in search engines with out it.
What are your views on Search Engines? Have they helped or hindered your website?
Search Engines are very important to me, I get around 50% of my traffic through search engine. They're not always the most powerful way of getting traffic though, I'm working on a Unicycle Flash game at the moment that I hope to get me a lot more traffic than all the search engines put together.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
so far I would have to say posting on the unicyclist forum, followed by google.
What method has been least successful for promoting your website?
I'm not to sure because the all contribute in some way of another. for example I don't get many hit from directory but they help me get good positions in search engines...
What would you like to see change with respect to the internet?
as an over all progression I would like to see it become more dynamic/interactive. I think it is going this way and in the future the internet will be completely customizable.
What new this have you planed for the next few years?
Over the next year I'm planing to incorporate flash in to my site and making the user accounts more customizable so when a user logs in the site look and feels how the want it to feel.
What is your website address?
UnicyclePics | Mountain Unicycling
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