Wow… I’ve been pretty bad with posting to my blog this month. I’ve been slack on Twitter as well. I’d like to say I’ve been working hard but the truth is that I’ve been slacking off a lot over the past few weeks and blog posts and tweets are always the first to slide. I think I’m all comfortable in my routine and might feel like there’s not much to report on? Who knows.

But I’ve got some news today. I’m finally (mostly) finished my newest site about Living in Kigali. I know I’ve talked about the site before but, now that it’s done(ish), I thought it might be interested to go through it and talk about where the idea came from, how it developed, how I think it can make money, and all that stuff. Maybe it’ll give you an idea for a new site or for improvements on a current site. I’m actually really proud of this site and think it’s my best one yet.

The Idea

I arrived in Kigali about two days after I discovered that it was the capital of Rwanda. I had no idea what to expect and the internet wasn’t much help. Eventually I discovered an unruly Yahoo group where all expats in Kigali communicate about everything from renting houses to finding jobs to figuring out what to do on a Monday night. The group is lively but the interface sucks and it’s not ideal.

Having been frustrated over and over again by the Yahoo group, I decided that Kigali could use a more ambitious website to bring the expat community together. I accidentally pitched the idea to some NGO workers while we were meeting about something completely different, and the site was born.

The Build

I worked at setting up the site for a couple of months before the NGO people lost interest but then I had to scrap the idea because I really didn’t, at the time, know enough about Kigali to be able to author a site to the standard I was aiming for. I figured I’d just move onto some other project and forget about it for now. But then a good friend hopped on board and I was inspired to get the site finished.

I spent about four months working almost exclusively on the site. It took a long time because I was learning the ins and outs of WordPress at the same time. Up until that point my only WordPress site was this blog which is a very simple layout without much complexity. For the Kigali site I wanted it to feel more like a website and less like a blog which meant having to tweak things and find plugins to make WordPress act more like a CMS. It’s been a pretty steep learning curve but I got there in the end and as a bonus, I’m able to do a lot more with WordPress than I used to be. Great news for future sites.

The Content

I want to be the website that every expat in Kigali thinks to go to first for anything they need. This meant that I’d need to create a forum to replace the Yahoo group. It’s probably the most important aspect of the site and I wanted to get it right. I decided to use miniBB and I contacted the guy who created it to see if he could do a custom install for me. I probably could have struggled for weeks to get the forum up, but I wanted a level of integration and simplicity that I couldn’t have figured out on my own, so I bit the bullet and paid Paul from miniBB to do things for me.

It was a great move and the site has an easy to use forum using the same login details as the rest of the site. This means that readers can log in once and be able to leave comments on posts as well as post to the forum. Keeping things as easy and straightforward as possible will be key to replacing an already hugely popular Yahoo group. It’ll be a challenge but I have a few ideas up my sleeve.

Second to the forum is the actual articles on the site. They’ll be more important in the beginning as the forum builds up and I wanted to make sure the information is informative, entertaining and useful. This is where my friend comes in. She’s lived here for over a year and is a fantastic writer and together we’ve been able to put up some pretty useful articles. There’s an area guide, transportation info, and then just general articles about all sorts of things. Even if you have no intention of ever visiting Kigali, there’s some funny writing in there that’s worth a read if you’re bored. I’m really happy with the friendly, humourous tone of the site and hope expats here find it entertaining and useful.

I also thought it’d be great to offer up reviews on local businesses – mainly restaurants, cafes, bars and clubs with hotels to follow eventually. I still need to do some work on the way the ratings are displayed but everything is functional and I hope this becomes a fun way to engage readers and create some dialogue.

The Rwanda Tourism Board are poop and finding information on travelling in this country is frustrating. I want to eventually become the place people end up when they’re trying to figure out how to travel in Rwanda. At the moment the tourism part of the site is pretty sparse but I’m teaming up with another friend who is Rwandan and works in the tourism industry to hopefully fill things in. I’m going to do a lot of SEO work to promote this part of the site.

SEO

The site was already ranking at number six with Google for the keywords ‘living in Kigali’ about a week after I registered the domain and stuck a blank site up. Now it’s at number one for those keywords. I’m going to put a push on the keywords ‘Kigali life’ so that when they hear about it through word of mouth and do a search, they’ll think my site is the one they heard about. Sneaky, yes… but the Yahoo group sucks so badly that I don’t care. In addition to using link building services, I’ll also swap links with blogs about Kigali and add links from my existing sites.

Kigali isn’t exactly a competitive keyword so I don’t think I’ll have too many problems ranking for anything to do with the city or Rwanda in general. Snagging the tourists will be a way to expand the readers and to attract the attention of tour operators and this will take a bit more work. The good news for me is that the sites out there now that deal with Rwandan tourism are pretty crappy. I think I can take them once I get off my ass and put some tourism info up.

The hope is to have all new arrivals to Kigali finding my site which I don’t think will be a problem. Then I’ll need to slowly work on getting the people who live here now to find out about the site which will be more to do with random business card drops and word of mouth. The expat community is small though and everyone knows everyone, it seems, so with a bit of time I think the site will gain in popularity.

Making Money

This site is different from any site I’ve built in the past and my usual methods of making money won’t work, I don’t think. In order to make money from Google Adsense, my site would have to display ads of interest to people living in Kigali and I doubt there are a lot of Rwandan businesses advertising with Adsense. Affiliate sales could work but the expat population here is so small that I probably wouldn’t have enough traffic to earn much this way through things like flights and insurance. If Rwandan safari companies had affiliate programmes then that’d work, but they don’t.

Private advertisers will be the way we earn with this site but I don’t think I’ll have a lot of businesses emailing me out of the blue, the way I do now. I think, at least at the beginning, we’ll have to approach businesses and sell them on the idea of advertising on our site. I’m no salesperson and this will be tough for me. I think we could also get creative and offer space for restaurants to showcase their menus, ad space on our mailing list, and things like that to make some money. Once we have the entire Kigali expat community knowing about and using our site, I expect opportunities will present themselves. It’s a small but lucrative market and I’m sure one that many businesses want to reach out to.

The funny thing is that neither of us are hell-bent on earning from this site. I know I’ve learned a lot building it and it’s been fun writing for it and working with my friend. She seems content to write when the mood takes here and doesn’t seem to be looking for a paycheque anytime soon (lucky for me!) I’d love for our hard work to pay off (and I think it will) but we’re both having fun writing articles and chatting to each other on our empty forum using various aliases (shhh!) It’s a really cool thing to be able to write things that you know don’t exist already on some other site and that will be really helpful to people.

Other Stuff

I think this is the first site I’ve built that I’m almost completely happy with. I’d like to add an events page but am looking for a good plugin and the same goes for a business directory but, otherwise, I really love the site. It’s the kind of thing I think could be easily replicated across lots of other cities and if I ever leave Kigali (which is looking doubtful) I would consider copying the format, teaming up with someone who knows the new city well and popping another site up. I wish I knew about theme development so I could package it all up and give it away or sell it to people who want an out-of-the-box city guide website.

So that’s my latest, greatest project more or less done except for content which will be added as the weeks and months roll by. We’re having fun with it and it’ll be great if it takes off. I’m excited to add another site that I’m proud of to my portfolio and to see where it goes. I really like the idea of being the main site for expats in Kigali and hope things turn out that way.

What do you guys think of the site? Any suggestions for articles, new sections, changes, design tweaks etc etc? As always, I’d love to hear feedback!