A UK-based Web site catering to the needs of South African ex-patriots celebrates its first birthday this month, after a year that saw the site expand from an e-mail service for travellers, to an extensive information source for South Africans in the UK.
Voetsek! (www.voetsek.co.uk) was established by ex-Capetonian Gary Baker in November 1999. "Voetsek! was conceived after I heard yet another South African accent on my way to work in the city of London," he says. "I had always wanted to set up some sort of Internet-based business and started (and ended!) quite a few before Voetsek!
"After finding very few worthwhile sites for ex-pat and travelling South Africans, I set up a basic site to test the waters - this had free e-mail and message boards, and information about some of the social clubs in the UK."
The site was live within two weeks of domain registration, and relied primarily on viral marketing using a promotional e-mail sent to "anyone vaguely South African". The first user registered the next day.
Internet start-ups made easy
Baker initially worked on the site in his spare time, with three volunteers contributing. As it became clear that more commitment was required, Baker started working on the site full time.
"There are now two of us: myself and Liane Grimes, the site administrator, who handles the day-to-day updates and general queries regarding the site. I look after the technical and business side, and we have a fairly large group of people who regularly critique everything we do to ensure we don`t slack off.
"We don`t have set offices, as all the work is done from home offices and any extra design or other work is done by freelancers. This means we aren`t wasting money on unnecessary office space, allowing us the flexibility we need to minimise costs. So far it has worked brilliantly and more than likely any future staff will also be part-timers or freelancers."
Loyal visitors
The site`s most recent unaudited statistics show just under 10 000 visitors per month with 45 000 page views per month. Baker says the site traffic has tripled in four months, citing July figures which estimate 3 000 visitors and 14 000 page views.
At the moment, though, registration is a relatively low 1 000. "User registration is not something we`ve been pushing particularly much as all we really had for registered users was free e-mail. From next year, we are introducing member benefits, which will entail a wide range of discounts and freebies from some of our partners and advertisers."
Partnership into Europe
These partners are located both in the UK and Europe. "We originally had two separate sites for Holland and Germany, which we`ve now combined into a single European site which caters for Western Europe. This allows us to provide far more information and dedication of time than is possible with multiple sites.
"At the moment it is fairly basic, but once the Christmas period is over we will be concentrating more on that side to improve it. I would like to see a similar offering to the UK site, but at this stage we are still monitoring the response to see what people really want."
For more information, visit www.voetsek.co.uk.
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