Craigs Directory - The History

Since its launch in June 2009, Craigs Directory has been visited by over 3.5 million visitors and has over 50 thousand websites listed.

This is not my first website, that was Craigs Minis, which I launched in 2004. To date it has only seen about 37 thousand visitors, but then again, it is very niche. I have developed a few other websites, but none have proved to be as succesful as Craigs Directory. Life's a funny thing, I spent 18 months developing a website that I was sure would succeed - it bombed, but with Craigs Directory I only spent about a week with the original design (sure, I have tweaked it a lot since then). Sometimes its the simple things in life that work the best.

The concept of ranking websites by credits (earned through clicks or purchases) was there from the beginning, but I must be honest in saying I never expected it to work so well. To date, over 2.7 million credits have been issued - which is well above my expectations.

Over the last year and a bit, I have made a few changes and put a few things in place to reward websites with lots of credits. These include:

• [±July 2009] Introduced the TOP 25 websites page
  
• [±May 2010] Show the top 3 websites (i.e. the highest credits) on every page of the directory
  
• [±May 2010] Show the top 9 websites on the home page
  
• [±May 2010] Show the top 9 websites of each category on the sub-category selection page
  
• [±June 2010] Developed a completely new web directory whos sole purpose is to list all websites in Craigs Directory that have earned credits by buying them.
  
• [±August 2010] Developed a Mobile version of Craigs Directory - lists/ranks all approved websites
  
• [±November 2010] Change the Add a Website to https (secure server)
  
• [18 January 2011] Created a Twitter and Facebook account for Craigs Directory
  
• [18 January 2011] Started updating the status of the Twitter, Facebook and my Google Buzz accounts with the urls of websites who purchase 2,000 or more credits ($10)
  

Regards,

Craig