Change of direction
It is possible to strike it rich by selling your web site to Google or another big operator. With that in mind, we bring you the tale of one man and his web site - getting the man himself (John Hill, who's fought off all bidders so far, cough!) to explain the genesis of daytripstoeurope.co.uk
Eighteen months ago the idea of designing and building my own travel web site from scratch made about as much sense as trying to stage Jurassic Park, The Musical. But with a bit of gentle arm-twisting I stepped well outside my IT-comfort zone and created www.daytripstoeurope.co.uk - the UK's first site dedicated to, well, I think you can guess.
To be honest, the site wasn't actually my idea. I was telling a mate - we'll call him Rick because that's his name - about a pitch I was working on with a friend for a travel guide-book called Day Trips To Europe.
As you'll have figured, the book was intended to be all about day-trips to Europe - or as some pedants have kindly pointed out, continental Europe.
The key thing we highlighted in our pitch to publishers was how surprisingly easy and inexpensive it is to get to cities such as Amsterdam, Bruges, Lille, Milan and Venice by train, plane or hatchback - and how it's possible to spend eight or nine hours enjoying the city and still be back home before midnight.
My friend and I had thought this was a great idea for a book. Rick thought it was an even better idea for a web site. He said there was lots of software that made it easy to produce great-looking sites straight out of the box, without learning a single line of HTML code. He suggested that I immediately abandon all thoughts of a book and concentrate on creating a site. I thought he was nuts.
Intro to the Bruges page
By the end of the evening, even though our conversation took place in a pub and alcohol was involved, I still thought he was nuts. But I did think it was worth registering the book title as web domain - along with a few variations - in order to protect the name.
Only one publisher responded to the book proposal and that was just to say "No". So, with rejection ringing in one ear and Rick egging me on in the other, I took my first steps towards creating a site. I signed up for some web hosting and started experimenting with a supposedly "easy-to-use" web package.
I get very impatient if I can't work out how to do something immediately - brain surgery, cold fusion, perpetual motion, finding the lost city of Atlantis - and I got extremely impatient with this software.
I'm sure it probably is easy to use, just not for me. I didn't have a fully functioning site in five minutes, so I was ready to give up.
But you know already that I didn't...
