I received an email from August, one half of the Leguajero team, last week drawing my attention to his site. I took a look and loved the idea straight off the bat and as I explored the site further I was impressed with the professionalism and function of the thing. Here is a short interview I did with him that will hopefully give a bit of insight into what’s involved in taking an idea and molding it into a great website.

What is Lenguajero and why did you decide to build it?

Lenguajero is a website that connects Spanish and English speakers for online language and culture exchange. In addition, we provide useful resources to learners of those two languages so that they can improve their ability to speak their new language.

We were living in Medellin, Colombia, and had been studying Spanish for a few months. We were getting to the stage where our Spanish was really starting to take off, that is, we were starting to feel comfortable speaking the language.

It was around this point in time that Natalie pointed out that, despite the thousands of language learning websites out there, none of them were focusing specifically on connecting Spanish and English learners with one another for conversation exchanges. Given how much spending time everyday speaking with native speakers had helped in our own learning process, we thought that there was real potential for this type of site. Since we had our laptops with us we thought, “What the hell, let’s give it a try and see if we can build something useful.”

How did you come up with the name?

Coming up with a name was one of the hardest things we had to do. First, we wanted it to be catchy and very targeted to what we were doing. Second, and more challenging, we needed it to still be available. Everytime we had a good idea we would WHOIS the URL and find out that it was already taken.

One day I was walking down the street in Quito, and the name just popped into my head. It isn’t a real word, but it is sort of a play on words in Spanish. A viajero is some one who travels. An extranjero is a foreigner. A lenguajero seems to be a mashup of a viajero, extranjero, and language learner. And, since I just invented the word, the domain was available!

Why did you decided to spend a year living in Latin America?

Both Natalie and I have been blessed to have the opportunity to individually spend a lot of time backpacking around the world. The experiences that we have had doing this have influenced our lives in a number of ways. However, one thing that neither of us had ever done was live in a foreign country and really learn to speak a foreign language.

We decided that we were getting to one of those “now or never” moments. We had talked for years about living in Latin America and learning Spanish. We also talked about grad school, careers, and a family. All things that would make it infinitely more difficult to travel. Now was our chance and we were going to take it.

What are some challenges you faced building a website while living in Latin America?

Surprisingly, we didn’t face any challenges that were unique to us living in Latin America. If anything this experience has highlighted for us just how flat the world has become. Instead of having a bunch of our own hardware and an office full of employees we have taken advantage of the almighty “Cloud”

We built the website on the google app engine which eliminated the need for any of our own hardware (except for our two beat-to-hell laptops), and nicely bundled all the development tools we needed to get the site up and running fast.

Websites like eLance and 99designs connected us with designers and programmers from around the world, and allowed us to outsource the work that we couldn’t do ourselves. At one point in time I was coordinating profile page design with a guy in Taiwan while Natalie was messaging with a team in Romania that was doing the HTML & CSS for our homepage. All this was done while sipping coffee in the comforts of our apartment in Colombia.

Did you have any experience with this sort of thing (HTML, site design, programming etc) or did you just work it all out as you went?

If I have one piece of advice for anyone who is thinking of doing something similar it is this - Bring a code monkey with you (they like to be called developers). Fortunately, Natalie, or mi mono de codigo as I call her, just so happens to fit the bill. With five years of experience working at Amazon.com she is as skilled a developer as they come. While I am virtually useless when it comes to the coding side of things I had spent the last 8 months before our trip working as a project manager for a software development firm, and had learned a lot from that experience.

Did you have to use much of your own money to get this thing off the ground… or investors… or were the costs minimal?

We have funded Lenguajero entirely on our own. That said, costs have been pretty minimal so far. We spent just over $1000 dollars on the original design and HTML work, and that was our only pre-launch expense. Since launching we have spent about $100 advertising with Google adwords, and are going through another round of design work right now that will probably end up costing about another $1000 dollars. That’s it.

Is it your intention to eventually be making a living by running this site? If so, how do you plan on monetising it?

Working on Lenguajero has really highlighted for both of us just how much we want to continue working for ourselves and avoided the dreaded 9-5 work world. Our goal is to get Lenguajero to a point where it could be paying one or both of us enough to continue working and traveling.

We have a couple of ideas for increasing our revenue. One, we are working on developing some new site features that we may bundle into a “premium membership” package. Users would then pay a few dollars a month to have access to these extra features. Another option would be an (or many) affiliates program with companies that sell learning material to English and Spanish speakers. The main site feature, conversation exchanges, will always be free to our members.

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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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