Every site needs a good balance between content and paid for advertising. For the Greek Islands Real Estate website we rely on volunteer contributors for the bulk of content which might be stories, articles or comments about previously posted articles and discussion topics in the forum. We rely on advertisers who upgrade from their Free Business Card entry to an additonal paid for advert in an appropriate category on the site for our income which we use to pay our staff, develop the product and make an honest profit. We pay commission to individuals who want to work with us as advertising sa

Free for visitors to use. You are not forced to create a logon if you don't want to browse our pages and contact our advertisers in complete privacy, with confidence that when you send any email it will be delivered to the person you expect. No copies are sent or kept anywhere or to anyone else (including us).

Free for advertisers too. If you have a property for sale or a service that is useful to home owners, you can advertise with a FREE advert in our FREE Business Cards Directories for each island and you can feature your website or submit your URL with us for free in exchange for a reciprocal link. You will need to create a logon to do this because we need to know you're a real person and not a spammer.

03-Oct-08 - Our site isn't really useful to visitors or advertisers yet because we're still working out the structure. No, it's not complete, so why have we made it live now rather than waiting?

With such a large and complex range of subjects to cover and the varying needs of the different types of users we anticipate to take into consideration, on a site that we intend making as interactive for visitors as possible allowing multiple people to contribute, create and edit content and images simultaneously - it takes time - testing and a good deal of trial and error to get the categories and menus balanced so that they work for all islands from both a technical and aesthetic angle. The list of behind the scenes jobs we're doing is ... well, quite frankly scary! So we're working very slowly and carefully to get the first island right and then will duplicate the structure for all of the others. In other words, we don't want to have to re-invent the wheel once we start rolling!

We're using Hydra as our starting point because it's the island best known to our Administrator. We have deliberately started at the deepest level of our site's structure and are building from the bottom-up to the home level to encourage more detailed content. We're aiming for intimacy of information rather than a superficial broad overview for each island that could have been more quickly achieved if we had started from the top-down or plagiarised from the millions of other sites on the Internet. Our aim is to make our site as transparent and as easy to reach the really "up-close and personal" detailed information we want it to contain as possible. We're concentrating our efforts at the moment on making sure that there are categories, forums, blogs and subject pages that can contain the information (articles, comments, topics and adverts) as they are created without having to restructure the entire site after all the other islands come online.

There are a number of reasons why we are live now and haven't waited until the site is more complete.

We are gathering feedback and testing functions, structure and ease-of-use with live "testers". Our testers are actively interacting with the site and they are creating and editing in a live environment, which in our opinion is far more valuable than if we were testing it in-house or in a laboratory situation.

By being live now on the Internet we are able to submit to search engines and so are in a position before launching our promotion campaign to optimise the site to get listed with a higher placement more quickly. The home page of the site already has a Page Rank of 3, which we are rather pleased with!

We are very keen to build reciprocal links that will help our popularity ranking but more importantly from our point of view, are actually useful to our visitors and not just a webmaster's method of artificially inflating their site's ranking. But of course to obtain links back to our site it needs to be live for other webmasters to see.

To achieve the depth of information and the level of "hands on, been there and done it" quality of content in the site, we are going to be very dependent on contributions from many people. We are actively recruiting Volunteer Contributing Editors (who get involved because they're passionate about their island), Photographers (who contribute images in exchange for a show case for their work) and Advertising Sales Agents (who will be paid commission) for each island or sales area. Additionally we will be approaching home owners on the islands to ask them to write articles for us about their experiences, the problems they've encountered, how they overcame the obstacles and what advice they would give to other people with the benefit of hindsight. And we will be approaching "experts" to ask them to operate blogs about their area of expertise and to answer forum questions. Again, our site is live now so that the people we are approaching and even visitors who have already found our site, can watch it growing and developing so they can better see how they can contribute with either short-term, long-term or just with an occasional involvement.

We're surprised but very pleased with the numbers of visitors who have already signed up with a member's login. The logs we keep of our statistics show that we are currently averaging 260 unique visitors per day from member's who are keeping an eye on the site as well as people, companies and search engines who are already finding us on the Internet.

We hope that is article gives you an idea of "where we're going" at the moment with our site and those who have actively supported us and shown an interest so far will enjoy seeing the site develop.

Ours is an ambitious project to undertake with a very small management team but we are very excited and enthusiastic about the results so far and are convinced that within a couple of years our website will be a popular and often referred to online guide for homeowners in the Greek Islands.

If you have any suggestions, requests for us to include other features, constructive criticism or other comments and feedback, please click here because we would sincerely like to hear from you.

Thank you for your interest.

Volunteering to contributing to the Greek Islands Real Estate website is something that we greatly value and appreciate. Whether you want to volunteer to enter content for an entire category, just a one-off personal experience story, or maybe a professional article or just an image, we will be thrilled to hear from you.

We are equally pleased to hear from advertisers who don't have a budget to pay for advertising and want to take advantage of our Free Business Card Directory listings and link exchange. But advertisers mustn't feel obliged to contribute just to get their advert seen. We mean it when we say it is FREE. Of course if you want an edge over your competitiors and have a budget, we would again be very happy to hear from you!

for anything to do with property ownership in the Greek Islands. So whether you're buying, selling, building, are already an owner or soon will be, this site will contain everything you need to know right down to providing you with hints and tips for living in the local community, education for your kids, finding a tradesman, getting deliveries, where to shop and where to accommodate your guests. And of course, finding your idyllic Greek Islands dream house in the first place.

Our site is open source and free for anyone to use. Like Dmoz and Wikipedia, it's run by real people who are dedicated to making it the best possbile resource for advertising property sales and real estate related services as well as providing helpful articles written by professionals and from personal experience, comments and quality links to further information.

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