The Alternative Directory was a site full of good intentions but it never really worked because I didn’t put my heart into it. The idea was to index alternative lifestyle websites with information about them and hope it would eventually get noticed to attract advertisers. That’s one of the oldest recipes of success in the internet world and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem was that at that point I knew very little about internet marketing and did not have the patience nor time to maintain a site like that.

I used PostNuke again as it seemed to be a reasonable open-source system to use, but at that time I started to notice that the PostNuke community had somehow changed and wasn’t as active as it was between 2001-2002. I didn’t find plugins with functionalities I wanted to use, the updating process was painfull and there was simply no time to dedicate to it. It was about that time I started to hear some about the mystifying “SEO” talk, and most people who talked about it were very disappointed with the ways things were.

I decided to keep the site up anyway, to show off as part of my portfolio. One of its problems is that it had a lot of functionality but virtually no content – something that gave me first-hand experience on the golden rule “content is the key”. Years passed and it eventually collapsed on itself.

Some projects are there to teach one how to failure…