Reviewing Yesterday’s Site Launch
Yesterday I launched Book Sale Scout, a new, searchable book sale directory for all the booksellers, book lovers, and book bargain hunters out there. The day definitely had its ups and downs, but I was altogether blown away by the amount of visitors to the site. Given the traffic on this blog and the additional promotion, I was expecting to see around 1,000 truly unique visitors for the day. So when I woke up this morning and got the final estimate, I was blown away that we nearly doubled that. I was also surprised at the outpouring of support, especially from library book sale organizers and online sellers. I originally launched the site with these two groups in mind.
While the site ran smoothly and handled the traffic well, we did encounter some bugs. The most significant was that our programmer failed to properly implement our “Search within X days” feature (pretty big deal that I’ll be working on today and tomorrow). Fortunately, I did make the search results table sortable by date, so this will help with searches in the interim. We had over 100 people sign up for Instant Sale Alerts yesterday, which, again, I could not believe. However, our programmer, ehem, for some reason thought that I wanted Sale Alert users to receive an email displaying our paid advertisers when they got approved. Therefore, when we approved our first paid advertisement last night, all subscribers got an email about this advertiser - this is a bug and not standard operating procedure. This was fixed once it was brought to my attention. Then of course, you always have the detractors. It’s business. I’m pretty confident in what we’ve created. It was high time for an improved book sale directory that can incorporate some new value-added features and catalog more book sales in one place than ever before.
