Behind the scenes: A round of introductions

In these blog posts we will go behind the scenes of ilikealot.com.

But first allow me to introduce the ilikealot.com team. As founder and creative director we have Erik van Geest. Our lead (and only) developer is Wouter van Vliet. Frank van der Niet acts as project manager and marketing director.

How it all started

It all started in june 2009 when Erik called contacted Frank and shared his thoughts about alikealot.com. They thought that the idea was stunning and we definitely wanted to get this project up and running.

It was agreed that we should not invest too much money (that we did not have anyway).

We agreed on investing our second most valuable asset: our time.

The team members of ilikealot.com invest their time and any benefits from this site are shared. Erik knew an excellent developer from a previous project and we were good to go.

The first steps

Being only a small setup, we started sharing our ideas (thank you Skype!) on what ilikealot.com should be like. Erik started to make his first design and I made the project plan. The latter one was quite simple: we go live within three months. OK it took us five months. We needed some extra time to let our ideas and dreams to grow to their full potential. But the whole thing was created in five months. Including the beta test that was happily performed by our friends and family (thanks again!). And as we speak now: we have not spent a single Dollar.

How to promote our 'baby'

And that is the fun of it. We get a lot of visitors each day. Thanks to social media we are able to promote our site for free. And a lot of traffic is generated by the content our users provide. And that is a cool ongoing loop: good content attracts visitors; our visitors post new content; that attracts new visitors; they post new content.

We think that ilikealot.com is a cosy place on the web with high quality content that allows you to take a high quality break at work or school!

Coming up

In our upcoming posts we will give you the in depth information on how our dreams materialised into this place on the web.

And of course you can follow us on Twitter:

• Erik van Geest (Geestman)
• Wouter van Vliet (Woutervanvliet)
• Frank van der Niet (frankvdniet)
• Ilikealot.com (ilikealot)