

What would you do? Or turning a website into a business. - IanMechura

A couple months ago I was approached by a good friend (we will call him Sam) who was taking a job with a large company with strict IP rules. Sam owned a free classifieds website that he had been maintaining for years but he needed to get rid of it due to the IP rules at his new company. So I purchased it in full for a very nominal amount of money.<p>The site is located at http://www.frimp.net and it currently has 5k registered users, 17000 postings and 25-30k hits per month. The current operational costs are about 45.00 per month. It is not stellar but I was thinking it was better than starting from scratch.<p>Does the community at large have any words of advice or suggestions on how to turn this web site into something valuable?<p>It is written in Java/Spring and I am about 75% through with a rewrite of the existing functionality  in python/django.<p>Any help will be very much appreciated.
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IanMechura
Anything other than UI?

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veb
Better UI.

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IanMechura
This is a secret... but... Here is a very, very rough version of the new UI.

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jayzee
It is such a secret that we cant even see it?!

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IanMechura
Yes, top secret... lol

Here is a link to my prototype: <http://www.thesaverssecret.com/>

One think I forgot to mention is that this website has very good rankings in
google for the following terms:

online yard sale - #1 online garage sale - #3 online sale - #4

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veb
Honestly. Your best bet would be to get a designer to design it for you,
rather than use something that reeks of a template.

Best way I've found when working with designers, is to sketch exactly what
_you_ think it should look like. Include colors or themes (from pictures if
you can) and then draw some sort of 'mascot', like a cuddly animal, or a
lightbulb. This gives the designer most bits of the puzzle, which in turn
allows them to (more easily) design you a unique website.

