I was looking at Expatsters thinking…”Do we really need that holding page everytime we click home?” The advantage of having it is that it gives us a chance to tell lurkers what we’re about, and let them in on what they can have a go at doing.

But…I wondered if having the activity channel as a home page would be more user friendly.

I reckon it probably is, but if anyone else has an opinion on it, have your say, and we’ll weigh up the options.

On an other issue, I fancy reminding you all of what is possible here.

1. You can create your own wordpress powered blog. Now. I’m thinking if you have always fancied having a review site of some kind, you can with these blogs. Affiliate yourself with a company selling something and write a review on it. That way you’ll get some commission on anything sold via your blog. Or maybe, you have a business that needs some kind of web presence. Go for it with our blogs.
2. You can chat with friends and family with the shoutbox. It’s easy to use. Click Chat, then Shoutbox and away you go.
3. You can create your own chat/discussion groups. Into painting, photography, art, needlework, animals? Create a group on whatever, and decide who takes part. If somebody gets a little to brusque, chuck them out. You’re the boss.
4. Use the site classifieds to advertise anything you like. It has to be legal though. We can’t sanction the sale of marijuana plants, no matter how cute or tomato plantish they look.

So remember guys, there’s a lot you can do here, and once you start, you may find it more fun than you thought.

You know what some community websites are like don’t you. They are heavy handed with the delete buttons and often don’t even bother to tell you they have deleted your post or provide a reason for doing so. And how does that leave you feeling? Pissed off? Angry?

Expatsters wanted to get away from that. We wanted something new and fresh. We wanted to somehow empower this sites users. So we came up with the current Expatsters format, which allows you the user to create your own Groups.

To me it’s so obvious that its the right way to go it hurts. So how does it work?

Click on the Groups tab, and you’ll see you have the power to create one yourself. It can be on anything you like. If you live in Oz, make it on that. If you are in France with a small holding, create one all about that.

Here’s the second cool thing about the Groups. You are the administrator of it. You can set the group up so that it is public, and viewable by all. Or maybe you can set it as an invite only group. This option allows you to invite people into it only. Others can apply, but you decide whether to accept their request. Untill you accept it, they are unable to take part.

In effect, a group is your own forum. You decide on its direction, and get to control the content. How cool is that?

So be brave and create your own group.

Unless you have a quarter of a million dollars for a marketing budget, getting a website like Expatsters known, is a long, thankless task. It’s dull, repetitive, at times frustrating, and you do not know whether or not your efforts are going to pay off.

There are some well established websites directed at the expat community already, and they do not throw their arms open wide when a new one turns up. So recruiting them to help is a “Not going to happen” option.

So, it’s a case of slogging through the net trying to find legit ways to promote the site.

Today will be more of the same. Twitter, youtube, facebook, and countless other video sites will be my tools. Creating videos will be paramount, today.

Expatsters has been tinkered with quite a bit in the past couple of weeks, as we look to making it as easy to use as is possible.

The immediate problem now is to get the word out. This is probably one of the toughest tricks to perform these days, as millions of websites fight for a reasonable position in the search engines. So we have looked to giving it a mention on a few expat websites, without upsetting to many people.

We are also going to be submitting scores of articles and press releases across the net in an effort to get us recognised. Fortunately, our efforts are starting to pay off and we have quite a few good, active members who have seen that this format can work for them.

Video is another area we are working on and so far we have submitted 10 to youtube. Hopefully they’ll help us get the word out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54D_Q-J3hAI

For years, we’d been running an expats forum focusing on Brittany in France. The naive idea in the beginning was to provide a web presence, for people like us, UK born, to have somewhere they could visit and chat freely about whatever they liked. Some of the forums out there have ridiculous rules and regs, so we felt our loosely regulated forum could work.

And work it did for a year or two. But with loose moderation comes trouble in the form of people getting incredibly nasty with people just out for some lively banter. So the decision was taken to close it.

We then took some time out to pursue different interests, and after some thought, decided we’d like to create more of a community based website, for people, not just in Brittany but across the world. We knew we didn’t want it to look like a forum though, but to offer people a quick and easy way to check on the latest activity of their fellow expats. That’s when Expatsters was born.