I’ve met a lot of people virtually through this web development gig and I try to keep up with how people are doing with new sites and their travels. One older friend is Steve who I first met via the Working Nomad forums ages ago… I can’t even remember when. Like me, he was inspired by the site and put his software development skills to work in an attempt to create an online income income and leave the rat race behind. He was successful and has been on the road since 2007 working as he goes.

Free Wifi Guru is his latest website offering and I like it. We thought it might be interesting to post a little interview to see what steps a successful web developer goes through when coming up with a new site. So here it is…

How did you come up with the idea?
Through personal experience. I was travelling round India and realised that despite it being such a powerhouse of IT, the places where you could get connected to the net for free were suprisingly few and far between. Even though there were a host of other wifi hotspot sites on the net, I’d found them to be variable in quality of information, not as informative as I’d have liked them to be, and lacking a global perspective. So on a bus journey to Bangalore I sketched out in my notebook the idea for a useful free wifi site initially pitched at budget travellers and fellow working nomads.

What design considerations did you have?
In terms of physical appearance, I wanted a clean “Web 2.0″ look; bright, colourful and modern. I also wanted to establish a ‘brand’ to make the site more memorable than the other wifi hotspot sites, and being influenced by my travels in India, the brand became a friendly, helpful ‘guru’. The site also needed to be quick and easy to use, especially the “add hotspot” page, because I eventually want users to drive the content by adding the majority of free wifi spots themselves.

What web technology did you use?
The site is written in PHP with a MySQL database to store the information, and it also uses some AJAX to update certain pages on the fly. PHP/MySQL is a simple yet powerful combination for a website and provides a wealth of opportunities over static HTML pages. For instance, I’ve coded the site so that if someone adds a hotspot for a country and/or city that’s not currently listed, when I moderate the submission, the web pages for that country and city are created automatically on the fly by PHP. This saves creating the new pages myself manually on my laptop each time and FTPing them up to the server.

What SEO considerations did you make?
This site is all about targeting the longtail - that is, targeting many non-specific, infrequently-searched phrases - and I was guided by the kind of search queries I was making myself in India, for instance, “free wifi in Bangalore”. For SEO purposes I ensured my title and headings were along those lines. I also had to consider how Google would spider my site effectively, so I added hyperlinks on the index page to each of my country pages, then city pages on each country page to ensure Google would be able to traverse all of my site. Apart from that, I haven’t made any special considerations. I will try to softly get the word out about the site via various channels, but I plan to rely on the quality and usefulness of the site to attract natural links to it to boost its search engine rankings.

How do you plan to monetise the site?
Curently I have Google Adsense blocks on the site which should eventually bring in some income, but I’m in no hurry to add any other income streams as yet. I want to build the reputation of the site with it looking clean and uncluttered; once it has taken off to some extent (and I fully expect this may not be until two to three years from now) I could try gadget/gizmo affiliate ads, or booking links for hotspots which are guesthouses/hotels. I realise that this affiliate lark is a slow game and you have to be in it for the long haul if you are going to get anywhere!

Any future plans?
The site isn’t as automated as I’d like; currently I have to look up the Google Map co-ordinates for each new country, city and hotspot and add them manually to the database. So somewhere down the line I plan to use the Google Maps API to automate the lookup of the City/Country co-ordinates, and perhaps provide a way for the user to pinpoint the wifi location on the map themselves. I also plan to add a means by which visitors can add comments on the hotspots currently listed. I can envisage the situation whereby someone has a different opinion of the hotspot, or they find the connection is no longer free and they want to tell the world about it!

Interview over, it’s me again. I love hearing how people come up with ideas and time and time again it is about feeling frustrated by what is currently available. This is a good example and I think Steve has done a great job creating a Web 2.0 feel along with a useful service. If you’ve got a free hotspot in mind, I’m sure he’d love to hear it so head to the submission page.

What do you guys think of the site? Any suggestions? Do you think it’s realistic to take on so many established sites in the free wifi game?

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