I have been working on Alert Ghana for a while now and over a period of three years I have pivoted several times trying to figure out what I really want to do. I am a self taught web designer & developer and graphic designer in Ghana, I love creating and experimenting with new things. Alert Ghana started as a news portal , I skim through headlines when I visit news portals and when any news that catches my attentions, I click to read. I had the general assumption (from my habits of how I consumed news on other websites) that people just wanted to know the headlines, so I positioned my website as something like a news headline aggregation portal, when you found a headline that interested you, you click to visit the source of the story. Deeply the problem I wanted to solve was, building a minimal website, to save news consumers data charges and time since most of the news portals were heavy on pictures and bloated code with lots of unnecessary plugins that took forever to load. Low traffic caused me to abandon the idea, people needed the news; not links to the news. I also had issues with search engine optimization because I was giving too many back-links.
I decided to re-brand Alert Ghana to a business directory so that small and medium enterprises will enlist their businesses on it, so that for example if someone wanted to find Kweku Babering Shop in Ashiaman in a search engine one of the results that show in SERPs should come from their listing on my website giving them more visibility and increasing the chances of them getting new business. I created digital flyers to do social media marketing. Find some below
After marketing this project for sometime, heavily on social media though, I had to abandon the idea again after sometime, Low traffic, I think most of the traffic was coming from me using different devices to check if Alert Ghana showed well on those devices (responsive), and checking if little tweaks worked well as expected. I was discouraged, I think I should have done more of traditional advertising, in person meetings, bill boards, flyers and building a team to help me . Unfortunately there is very little you do when you’re bootstrapping without a lot a money, the only capital you have is time, I halted the project and got a job so that I could trade my time for money, that’s a different story for later.
I learnt a lot from these projects though; how to design, write modular reusable code, custom database queries and many others. The knowledge gained is the positive part. I can use those parts in future projects. Lesson learned, we move.
