Hi everyone,

Today, I'm very pleased to report that WOMOW went live at www.womow.com.au.  We celebrated with a champagne at Brad and Tracy's house (and decided that the next champagne milestone would be 3000 ratings).

Brad and I have been working on this seriously now for 8 months - I never would have thought it would take this long to get the first version of the site up and running!  I guess everything takes longer than you ever expect.  I guess it's also evolved to be quite different from the initial concept as well. 

Since the original idea, we've added the Fundraiser concept which is a way that WOMOW can give back to the community, whilst also increasing the number of ratings on the site.  Basically we'll give $100 for every 100 ratings submitted where the user has elected that particular fundraiser.  We think that if schools and other organisations want a fairly easy way to raise money, it'll help them and help WOMOW gain some traction - especially in the early days.  However, neither Brad or I have much experience with fundraisers so time will tell whether these types of organisations will actually value this as an alternative fundraising method.  (We reckon it's better than washing cars or selling chocolates though.)

We've also added in the idea of Special Offers.  At the moment, we've only got a couple of Special Offers listed, but we're hoping to attract a lot more.  Although businesses can't change their rating on WOMOW, if they want to entice new customers, they can give them a real incentive to try a new business.  This way consumers can decide whether they want to choose the business with the best rating, or a business that has an OK rating and is offering them a great deal.  More power.

Anyway, we didn't make a big deal about going live today.  Wanted to make doubly sure that we had no problems.  Everything seemed to go smoothly except for one friend that couldn't access the site at all.  Still not sure why that is because everyone else can access it fine.  Our plan from here is to try to enlist the help of our friends and family to enter some more ratings.  As I write this, we now have 295 ratings.  Not too bad but a long way from our target of 10,000! 

Today was also a day that I headed back to MBS for the first class of my second last subject.  Don't feel like I've got an awful lot done today, but there's still the rest of the night ahead.

Bye for now,
Fiona