History MojacarOnLine

HISTORY MOJACARONLINE

MojacarOnLine as a concept was initially an idea of Phil Jones in the early autumn of 1999. He wanted to create a modern way of making publicity in the area at a reasonable and affordable price, making use of the latest technology, InterNet. Although Phil had (and has) excellent knowledge of marketing and sales techniques he knew very little about the actual technique that was used to setup web pages. So he approached the only person that he knew that might have that knowledge, me. Luckily I was one of the first people in Mojacar that had an Internet connection and was just playing around creating web pages with a tool that was provided by Netscape, at the time the best Browser. Phil called me and we decided to have a first talk at Tito's bar on the beach. Although the bar was closed, we agreed to give the idea a go and start a few initial steps to set it up:
First of all, a domain had to be purchased and I would have a look at the possibilities.
It was going to be a 2-person business so a contract had to be made between us.
We needed a rough idea how we were going to setup the site with which categories in it.
A pricing system had to be set up, clear for ourselves and clear for our future customers
A web design program had to be purchased.
A Host had to be found where our new site would be parked.
A Financial Plan had to be made comparing estimated Income and Expenses.
We spent most of the autumn of 1999 in preparing all these points and finally in November 1999 MojacarOnLine was born with the domain name www.mojacaronline.com.
Our first customers were contracted in December 1999. They were:
El Cid, Samoa Surf, Rumours, Batur, Mojacar Estates, Complete Holiday Care, Coastal Properties, The Jolly Lemon and Sovereign Car Rentals.The first pages were pretty basic and made with a WYSIWYG tool called Splash! Later a program called NetObjects Fusion was also used with more sophisticated tools. We made a website for our new sponsor Desert Springs Golf Course in 2001 with it.
Nowadays most pages are created with the generally accepted web site tool Dreamweaver, although also both previously mentioned programs are still used occasionally.In those early days it was quite difficult to persuade businesses that what we were proposing was the way forward for advertisers. Everyone knew about the internet, but hardly anyone used it. If a business owned a computer, it was generally used as little more than a typewriter or a til.
The only way to sell the idea was to use a laptop (which at the time were both expensive and bulky) and actually show people what they would be getting.
Nowadays, fortunately, almost every business is on line and the lap top is redundant!

As time went by more and more people became aware of the internet and could see the possibilities it offered.
Suddenly, almost overnight, everyone became an expert and would start to ask complicated questions about numbers of hits and how could they monitor where their enquiries were coming from etc.
Other people saw what we were doing and inevitably started to copy us thinking this would be a good way to make loads of money!!! When we started, The search page for Mojacar on Google.com contained about 100 entries. Today,there are over 1,500,000 !

We then made 2 crucial decisions which remain our unwritten policy today.

The first was not to make the site to big. There is no point having every business in the area advertised, as the more that are detailed, the less chance they have of being seen. It is also only fair to our loyal repeat advertisers to keep it this way. Its a simple numbers game which we were not prepared to play. It is also impossible to keep a large and complicated site up to date, as businesses come and go all of the time, especially in this area and you can never rely on the advertiser to tell you what they are doing, you have to find out for yourself.

The second thing we had to do was secure our place at the top of the lists of all of the search engines so that when people enter a search for "MOJACAR" they would see us straight away. If we could achieve this it would prove exactly where their web sites were being seen and where the enquiries were originally generated.
Several companies now offer to build and host web sites for many of our advertisers and these benefit greatly from our positions on the search engines, as all of the enquiries originated by our site will ultimately come to the advertiser via them. This of course increases the number of "Hits" they can claim as well,so don't be fooled by the numbers. They are never what they may seem to be.
Also be careful, as these companies will often charge for the construction of your web site (which should be a one only payment) every year, and you don't even own it!!

People now often ask "How do you get to be number 1 on Google and Yahoo.com?"
The answer is simple. Have the right product and market it correctly. You also have to spend at least 3 years constantly liaising with the search engine controllers, sometimes for days on end!!

Several years ago, the number of golf courses proposed for the area increased dramatically www.almeriagolf.com then came into existence.
We decided to create a site which would give as much information as possible about the golf courses in the area .
Originally as part of MojacarOnLine, almeriagolf.com now enjoys similar status as its old host and occupies the top position on all of the major .com and English language search engines. You can see this for example by going to yahoo.com and typing in the words Almeria Golf (this particular example hosts almost 4 million entries. Fortunately you need look no further than the first one).

Today, we are the number 1 web site advertiser for Mojacar due to our undisputable search engine positions (our advertisers of course occupy the same position as we do) and our unbeatable prices, no increases in 10 years.

Phil Jones

Gus Schohaus

Click HERE to see OLD versions of MojacarOnLine

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