Jiyan Wei is an online entrepreneur in Los Angeles who initially used the open source system Drupal to initially start his online business BuildZoom.com, a site helping homeowners find trust-worthy contractors.
Shortly after rolling out the Alpha version of Buildzoom.com, Jiyan and his business partner Dave Petersen ran into a problem with Google.
"We aggregated information on contractors using 18 different variables and using an open platform for users to make recommendations we quickly reached 5,000 to 7,000 visitors per month. But then we noticed we weren't getting crawled by Google. The search engine saw this site spring up overnight with thousands of pages. They didn't trust our information."
The team also noticed the bounce rate was high.
Jiyan and his team switched from Drupal to Code Ignitor. "We discovered Drupal wasn't good for complex systems with lots of tags and data. We were also creating a product on a tight budget."
One of the strategic decisions that BuildZoom.com made was to let users participate without having to register. "We whipped the site into shape from a performance standpoint and spent a lot of time double checking our work.
"Then we redesigned the front end and got rid of the registration needed for users to participate. Our goal was to make the site as easy as possible to use."
In January 2011, the team released a second version of the site and traffic climbed from 10,000 visitors a month to 30,000 visitors. By August 2011, the site was attracting 300,000 users monthly.
Click here on Runningasmallbusiness.net to read part one of BuildZoom's start-up, growth, and challenges.
Click here to read Oneline Entrepreneur Used Personal Experience to Start a Business.
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