Name of your website?The Guatemala Times
Your name?
Boss Persson
Your Location (city, etc)
Guatemala City
Please give us a short summary of your website?
The only Daily News Media outlet about Guatemala in English. We try to present fair and balanced news and articles.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
No one was presenting any news worthy content about Guatemala in English.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
1995 it was our presentation site for web development in Costa Rica called cyber.co.cr
How did you decide on a name for your website?
We looked for a name that could relate to our content and ware could register a related domain name.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
Easy to navigate and the news up on front. We have prioritized users over search engines. But most of all, unique content made by humans.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
To be THE on line media for the region.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
We have a long term plan and don’t expect to make any significant money the first year. We earn enough with Google Ads to pay for the server, etc.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I wouldn’t change much! I would hire more journalists to help us with content and someone to help with editing. Then I would speed up the replication of the idea to the rest of Central America. But we need more collaborators for that to keep the quality level.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, we have planned for scalability and we can grow as much as we like. I have done the mistake to not think of this before and we built it in from the start. We can run the same content on several servers and cluster the single sites.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Nothing really unexpected. We had to change hosting service a few times, but that is pretty normal. I also changed over from ColdFusion to PGP and it took a bit of time and effort to do that switch.
What has been your biggest challenge?
To get content in English for the Guatemalan news.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Submit the site to most of the Search Engines and directories. Then have a SE friendly site with top notch content. We are applying a long term and conservative SEO strategy. Content Rules!
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
As usual, it takes a lot more time than expected to get a good site going.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Since 3rd of May 2008. So we are the new kids on the block! We will keep going as long as people will read our articles and the reader base increase. We have a moderate growth with about 100 unique visits per day per month.
What is your website address?
The Guatemala Times
