SurveyorConnect
Link: Click to Visit
Website Type: Community, E-Commerce
Business Type: Construction
Colours: Grey, Orange
Agency Tasks: Content, Copy Writing, Custom Code, Design, Logo Creation, Marketing, Photography, SEO
Hosting: GridPane (Cloud, Managed, WordPress)
Since 2010, SurveyorConnect has provided free discussion forums to the Land Surveying community.
SurveyorConnect is a peer-to-peer platform providing community-based discussions and support for Land Surveyors and Geomatics Professionals all over the world. Our goal is to serve and support people that know and love Surveying and related topics, so they can keep up-to-date in their industry, while learning more, and getting more work done.
This website was built on a whim, at the request of several land surveyors throughout the United States and Australia. I honestly didn’t expect it to get off the ground, so I quickly set it up in an afternoon using a standalone script called MyLittleForum. I used MLF because it looked very similar to the early-WWW forums and that’s what these surveyors were used to. Within 6 months, SC grew to over 2,000 registered members and 10k monthly unique visitors, but MLF was not built to handle a forum of this size. We converted it to xenForo, which was our first mistake. xF is overly complex and the users didn’t like it (neither did I). After about a year of suffering through xF, we finally moved to wpForo in WordPress, and everyone is happy (myself included). We are currently (2021) enjoying up to 70k unique visitors every month and nearly 11k registered members.
Initially, we used Google AdSense to display ads, but the cons outweighed the pros. So we started offering banner ad space, which started off slowly, but now pays the bills and then some. Advertising is growing, traffic is growing, members are growing — so our advertising prices are growing as well. We have many plans in store for future features and hope to make this website a major part of our overall income.