Martin,

Your current website is static content and hence you need to amend the webpage for each new overlander entry.

What you need are dynamic pages where the page content comes from a database behind the scenes on the web server.

Overlanders wanting a listing on the site then fill in a form on a webpage which updates the database directly which then includes them on the website using a call on the database.

PM me for more details and recomendations.

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www.africaexplorer.org

We started our trip in Aug 2006 and have been trying to get our site on africa-overland. Not for fame or glory but to get up to date info out to fellow travellers ASAP. Martin has done a tremendous job but everyone with a web page realises how time consuming it can be. We have opened up a web page as an humble alternate to Martin's- it's just begging for some-one to come along and inject some ideas!! home Our current personal web journal is NESSIESADVENTURES

Martin - you should go with a Wordpress or Blogger.com blog, as someone else here has suggested. No need for web development, get up and running in minutes, and grant admin access to others to post/maintain their own pages. Very simple, and free. You can also transfer your domain very easily.

My site (Hilton's 4WDTraveller.com) runs on Blogger with a Google-hosted domain ($10/year) for example. Cheap, almost no web design required, leaving me to focus on content (which I should get back to). Best of all I can update it from almost anywhere--cell phone, inet cafe etc...

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I would happily offer help on the website but am running out of time before our planned departure date. Which is early April. Touring Africa is our site, and would really like to see it appear on africa-overland.net. And anyone elses that is going at around the same time.

I am very keen to start a African website. In fact we have started with some prep. All overlanding goodies with plenty trip reports. We are trying to incorporate retellers and links to people who have exp.

So if you want and people dont mind we will start with uploading in a months time.

Let me know what everyone thinks.

We are tring to get funding through advertisers so no cost will be incurred

I'm interested to see the interest people have in an "overlanding" website, particularly for Africa.

I've been watching the growth in 4wd traffic on HU, and have for some time been contemplating more for the 4wders on HU. I've been very busy with a massive upgrade to the backend of HU, and it's almost there, much of it in use now, so perhaps it's about time we started with a 4wd expansion of facilities and pages?

Perhaps a dedicated sub-site - e.g.

HorizonsUnlimited.com/overland or perhaps:
HorizonsUnlimited.com/4wd

and trip reports etc from there. Votes on which?

We are adding in all new blogging facilities and page creation for all users, so anyone who wants to do a blog is welcome - and it's free, as it always has been for bikes. New page creation will be a great way to add tech information too, to help answer all those pesky tires and pump and winch questions.

To those who think advertising will support your site - we've been at it for ten years and are nowhere near there yet! The addition of some 4wd advertisers might just push us over the top though, so yes I am definitely interested in significantly expanding the 4wd stuff. The synergy between 4wd overlanding and bike travel is obvious - or you wouldn't all be here, so rather than reinvent the wheel with a whole new site which won't have either the traffic or anywhere near the content, why don't we try to expand on what's already here?

If anyone wants to be involved let me know!

I'm interested to hear your thoughts and ideas!

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Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
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Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

We have plenty resellers and are willing to pay a minimal fee for the site hosting.

We also got 2 magazines interested in having a dedicated page.

perhaps we can link up through you or vice versa.


i think there is definitely a market for a slick africaworld overland site

As a lot of overlanders have their own website I propose the HUBB creates a linkpage like the sleeping africa-overland.net Personally I do not think it is necessary to distinguish between bikers and 4WDers, the travel experiences are most interesting irrespective of mode of transport. Specifics to the kind of transport are already covered very well in the fora/forums.
For those who do not have/wish their own website a blog on the HUBB would be very good of course. On the mentioned link page(s) one could link to these HUBB blogs as well. My preference would be a page per continent. One can just replicate a link for those travelling on more then one continent.

Cheers
Henk

What's wrong with the current HU linkspage? Other than - oops - there isn't a 4wd category - easily fixed, since we are in the process of a big conversion / update for it, although the content will be the same, you'll be able to add links easier. anything else?

See the Travellers Stories section link on left. (blogs)
We can do that in the links page design coming, no problem - part of the upgrade is being able to sort by region, country, etc... and now back to work on it!

thanks for the feedback!

__________________
Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
------------------------
Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

Tell me more please - not sure what you mean by dedicated page for magazines. Send me an email with your thoughts if you wish. (Contact HU at bottom of page)

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Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
------------------------
Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

Hi Grant,

What you're proposing for 4 wheelers is what I'm building with my 4WD site right now. It's currently a 4wd site/blog with reader comments, but it's expanding to include links, free blogs, and forums as well. HU has the motorcycle adventure market pretty much cornered, so I figured I'd try to carve out a 4WD niche...;-)

As a revenue source for HU, have you considered Google ads? With your traffic I imagine you could bring in hundreds overnight...

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Hi There,

My two pennies worth.....

Whoever wants to take over the role of Africa Overland should remember/work out what it was about that site that was so neat. To me, it had a beauty about it, in that you have a little picture and summary of each trip, so you could get a real feel for each blog. And these were provded by the web site owners themsleves. Also the fact that you had new blogs arrivving all the time it was worth coming back.

My ideal preference would be for Africa Overland to continue, but I know how much work that would be. If Martin wanted me to, I would take it over for a year, but I would only be able to commit to perhaps monthly updates. But, I say that only because I love the site, and not because of any desire to become Overlord of the Overlanders! If someone else wanted to do it I would much prefer them to do it, but would also help out there too.

Oh, and don't forget that 4wd'er don't just travel to Africa, and although Africa Overlands name was a slight misnomer, any new entity should perhaps not follow that naming convention. well if you want to appeal to all.

Good luck to whoever ends up running it, I really hope it lives on somehow.

Cheers

Ollie

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Ollie

www.jollyfollies.com

Land's End to Sydney 2009

You are right there is something great about why the format The Africa Overland Network works so well - not to mention that this site has linked to the HUBB as the forum for years. It would be a shame to see it consigned to history but if Martin has lost interest maybe the time has come to start a new one.

One of the great things about it was the absence of advertising.

Good point about the limitations of the name.

Grant - I like your idea of upgrading the HUBB to give more links to 4wd howver I think most of the information on the Horizons Unlimited the website and HUBB serves both communities already. For this reason it would make sense to completely overhaul your site to promote both. Why be a biking site with links to waliking/4x4/cycling when you can be the authority on all overland modes of transport. This would mean changing the overall image of Horizons Unlimited - start with simple things like changings the picture on the top left of the site to that including a Land Rover etc.

Well that's my opinion anyway.

Richard

I've launched an "Overlander's 4WD Lounge" and anyone can add their 4WD website or blog. It doesn't compare to Africa-overland, but it is free, always updated, and the site does get fairly significant visitor traffic (but there are text ads in 3 places).

If anyone is interested let me know and I'll send you the link and you can check it out for yourself.

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Well I have finally launched a site to take forward the baton as the Africa Overland site has been dormant for so long. It can be reached at Africa-Overland.Org.

It follows the ethos of the original site. It is independent and advertising free and allows you to enter a biography, site & trip details and a photo of your choice.

I would like all you overlanders to come and register your sites here and any overlander resource site (equipment, parts, etc) that you have found useful.

I found in testing that I couldn't have instant publishing onto the site (because of adverts entered into the forms - principally phamaceuticals of course) but I plan to review and release the new records daily.

I hope with your help that we can get this vital research resource available for the community again.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

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www.africaexplorer.org