My Baby Is Born...

It's finally here... last night at midnight PST, weighing in at several megabytes and taking a huge weight off my shoulders, we launched the site! Ironically, it has been about 9 months since I signed on our second set of developers after a snafu with the first one. You can officially check it out at www.ontheroadtravel.com. It has been a roller-coaster the past few weeks and on Monday I was pretty much ready to call it a day (not for the first time), but we finally have a product!

There are still a few kinks to work out with the member features, so the member invites won't go out for a little while, but we are pretty much there.

Hindsight is always 20-20, but in retrospect I would have done things a LOT differently. Once I got going on ideas, I was convinced that it all had to be done at once. Really, the content should have been up months ago. But, i guess that wouldn't have changed anything with the most recent problem I had. Ever since the site was launched on the demo server, the photos have looked awful. I kept asking the programmers and they would tell me: it will be fine once it goes up on the live server. Yeah right! We uploaded it to the server a few weeks ago and the problem actually got worse. So, of course, the programmers blamed the hosting company. After a week of getting nowhere with the hosting company (literally, nobody at the help line knows anything about technology and every query has to be sent to an email that never gets answered) I had completely lost my patience. Everyone blaming everyone else, but no one offering a solution. I even had guys at Cisco trying to upload a new graphics program for my hosting company... So, on Monday, I got fed up and took all the pictures off and figured, OK, I'll just launch the site without the photos and get that fixed (along with all the other things that the programmers screwed up) in the next round of changes. As soon as I did that, the problem was solved! Go figure.

Anyways, please take a look through it and let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, etc.

Have fun!
Jen

PS - Peru will be the next country on the list. If anyone has been recently and has some recommendations, I'd love to hear them, just post a comment on the blog.

Comments

[Cris Zimermann]

Hi, Jen!

I just checked out your new site. Gosh it's great!!! And so is your blog! Lots of information, good stuff indeed. Wanna swap links? I'll add you to my new blog the Virtual Entrepreneur and also to the Business Opportunities Brasil one. My readers would be delighted with your travel experience and stories :) Whenever you've got time, come for a visit ;)

Best wishes and cheers from Brazil,
Cris Zimermann