InterSites New Home Page

I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally relaunched the first stage of our InterSites.co.uk site. For those of you that don’t know InterSites.co.uk is the hub site of the network. It no longer will contain any topic specific content, but will instead be a shop window for every site in the network.

The first stage of this is now live. Each of the 520 individual Inter Sites is listed by the following categories as well as in A-Z form. The categories are as follows:

• Arts & Entertainment
• Business & Commerce
• Careers & Jobs
• Cars & Transport
• Computers & Hardware
• Education & Learning
• Electronics
• Finance & Money
• Food & Drink
• Games & Toys
• Government & Society
• Health & Fitness
• Home & Garden
• Internet
• Lifestyle & Fashion
• Music, TV & Film
• Reference
• Relationships & Family
• Science & Nature
• Shopping & Gifts
• Sports & Hobbies
• Travel & Holidays

At the moment each site has a screenshot and snippet of information about it, such as our Gardening site which you can see here.

Advertising

In the coming months we will incorporate all the advertising options across the sites, all collected in one place. We’ll probably be offering initial advertising options such as:

1. Display advertising
2. Site sponsorship
3. Enhanced listings on our business directory sites
4. Contextual advertising through our own Adsense-like program

Some exciting things are in store and I’ll be announcing those on the blog as and when they appear. in the meantime, check out a slideshow of all 520 sites here.

Network Search

As part of the new site we also launched our network search. From InterSites.co.uk you can now search content across the entire network of sites. Initial indexing completed yesterday evening and will be updated every month as we launch new content and sites. Currently there are approximately 150,000 pages of content across the network.

InterSites.co.uk Home Page

In these common question posts I’m going to try and answer some of the most frequent questions I get about the Inter Sites. Feel free to send any questions not covered through and I’ll try and answer them.

Q. What are  the Inter Sites / What is the Inter Sites Network?

A. The Inter Sites are a network of UK websites offering information and advice on a variety of topics. Although primarily a content network, we also seek to provide useful tools and community features, where appropriate.

Q. How many sites do you have?

A. There are currently about 520 sites in the core Inter Sites network. In addition we have just started creating a further 75 geo sites covering all the cities in the UK, so all together about 600.

Q. How long have they been around?

A. We launched the first site in 2002 (InterCoffee.co.uk) and launched the hub site (InterSites.co.uk) in summer 2003. We  have gradually added other sites since then.

Q. How many of you are there?

A. We have tried to keep the number of employees as small as possible. We currently have the 2 founders (myself and one other) working full-time as well as a full-time contractor. In addition we have several part-time contractors doing project work for us, and outsource as much non-core work as possible, such as hosting, financial etc.

Also check out Part 2 and Part 3.