The travel season for road trips to Alaska have renewed our spirits here at TentAlaska.com. We established this site late last year after our last trip up north and have been somewhat slow in our development. We’re running busy jobs, multiple side projects, starting our summer garden and trying to get outdoors when we can. But lately, a lot of progress has been made and I estimate we’re about 75% finished with the site at this point. It’s a lot of work to establish a concept site, especially when the motivations are purely to educate and hopefully establish a community of like minded users, not financial gain.
A lot of the work to the site as of late has been in the background. We intentionally ignored things like SEO (search engine optimization) for the site while we’ve been somewhat in a partial state as we wanted to insure a quality experience for our users. A lot of that work has now been completed, so our hope is that search engines will start targeting us a little better. As of this writing, we’ve seen about 100 users and have a pretty low bounce rate, so that means our target audience isn’t being reached. These efforts should hopefully help these things a bit more.
Some additional efforts have been made to new and existing content and that’s what we’re really striving for here. We’ve recalibrated on a few initial concepts and have started to hone in on exactly what we want to provide. We’re hoping to communicate as much as we can about tent camping on your way to Alaska and hopefully encourage more people to do it. We want to see more tents and less RV’s on our next trip! There’s a lot of grand visions where we’d like to take things with TentAlaska.com, like documenting various campgrounds, yet even more content, perhaps some video integration and maybe even a social media outlet. But, these things will have to wait until we have the time and actually get the initial vision for the site completed. I guess you could say we’re still in beta with 1.0 coming soon!
There’s also been a lot of detail placed on site optimization. We’re in the 90th percentile range on both Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s PageSpeed, caching efforts and other things that will make the site responsive to users. That’s good enough for me and I see little reason to try and optimize things any further. This is probably unimportant to most users here, but again, it’s all because I care about your experience.
A little bit of editing work has also been performed. A lot of what I write is stream of consciousness and while it works for me, it can also sometimes result in less than clear intent or poor choices of wording. When we do finally get to “1.0” as it were, my hope is to provide a more comprehensive editing effort on what’s been written in order to make sure the language and concept is as clear as possible. Establishing a website like this is a lot like writing a book, I would imagine. It takes inspiration, time, editing and efforts towards “publication” or drawing viewers to what you’ve done. We’re getting there and starting to feel pretty good about what we have to offer.
For those of you that have visited us, all 100 of you, we appreciate it. We’ve also seen some return visitors, so that’s much appreciated as well. We’re hoping to continue to contribute content and answer your questions that you may have about a road trip to Alaska.
Camp on!