It's one of the difficulties of starting up a community/forum site - getting enough people in one place at the same time to start a conversation and then keeping enough people coming through to keep the conversation going.
I know there's established dive forums like scubaboard, but I was hoping to be able to add something extra, in terms of scuba guides (a lot have been written by users).
We've probably got about 5-6 members that are very dedicated and regular - people like Atlanticscuba, tropicalshark, komodo and Wookie are all really helpful, post on a regular basis and are generally lovely people.
I'm hoping we can build a community like this, so do tell your friends!
I've been working on ways to promote the site - mainly search engine optimisation (trying to get the site to rank in Google) and slowly adding more integration with things like Facebook.
We only launched in November 2008, so we are still quite young, although we are up to a fairly constant 10,000 visitors per month now.
We're certainly not going to fade out. I try and slowly cover the cost of the site with things like Adsense and I don't mind selling banners - but the content will all be non-bias in terms of reviews of dive locations / centres etc.
There are still some things I'd like to perfect, like the gallery. Linking images to specific users I think would be helpful, but it's difficult to find a way that works well and provides people with what they want. I'm kind of experimenting to see what people like and use, to work out what to expand (it's only me that runs, codes, designs and promotes the site).
I'm going to Egypt for another two weeks diving in a few days so I'm thinking about taking the video camera and seriously boosting the amount of video content on the site, as people seem to like video
If you're looking for a scuba blog, Steve on
www.thescubageek.com is a cool guy that blogged about his time living in Roatan and diving.
But do please stick around and tell a friend
