The Brighter Place Blog

Well, we’ve made it into 2007… after 6 months, believe it or not, we are still here

SEO news for A Brighter Place - 1st page for “barcelona nightlife” still 1st page for “barcelona student accommodation” and derivatives, same for “lisbon student accommodation”, “student apartments in lisbon” and so on. Second page for “lisbon nightlife”. 1st page for “erasmus lisbon” and “erasmus barcelona”. Google hits have boomed in the past two weeks or so.

For the second time (maybe third…) since the launch of the site, all three members of the team are gonna get together this Tuesday. And we promise to stay sober and actually discuss site features and suchlike this time round… In the works are plans to “wikify” A Brighter Place and make it as open as possible - to make it truly “for students by students”, implement RSS to make life easier for our loyal readers and… a little secret just between you and me… I have a feeling the third city for Brighter Place may be launched sooner than predicted. Where is it gonna be? Wait and see!

BTW, once again, we beat the records for unique visitors in December. Slowly but surely, A Brighter Place will take over the world. MUHAUHAUHAUHUAHUAH

Until next time my friends, adeu and adeus!

I know hardly anyone checks this blog, but what the heck. We’ve started it, might as well continue it. Just killing time before another Friday night (Of work, obviously. Doing continual research for the good of mankind )
As you have hopefully noticed, we’ve been trying to keep the site as up to date as possible with quite a few posts per week on both Barcelona and Lisboa sites. If you’ve accompanied A Brighter Place from the beginning, you will have also noticed more graphical and multimedia content… We thought that the site was getting a bit dull without photos and videos. So most of our posts on the homepage are accompanied by flickr and youtube content. The beauty of the Internet - everything is out there, you just have to find the right thing for you

In other news… We’ve been working behind the scenes to strengthen current partnerships and consolidate future ones. At the moment, we are working with cultoura and bcnweek on the Barcelona front. We have already had a couple of meetings and developed positive contacts about partnerships in Lisbon. And we hope to have good news in the New Year about the Lisbon site in regards to partnerships.
In terms of SEO (for you computer geeks), we are number one for “lisbon student accommodation” and derivatives. Still on the front SERP for “barcelona student accommodation” and derivatives. Hits from Google have gone up 100% in the past 2 months - always a positive sign

What else can we say… we’re still going out, getting wasted, looking out for new spots, new bars, new clubs, interesting parties (or maybe just plain parties will do!), where to eat cheap and good food… Basically just out havin a fucking great time. In both Barcelona and Lisbon. And sharing it with you!

Remember, spread the word in Lisbon! Or spread the word in Barcelona!

Yes, I am sure you have noticed - not many updates this November. Fear not, we are back and better than ever Should expect constant updates all around the site - the Play! section, courses, the main page - in both Barcelona and Lisboa.

In other news, our work in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is paying off - we are in the first results page in Google for “Barcelona Student Accommodation” - apparently there a companies who would pay, literally, thousands of euros to be on that spot. And here we are, a bunch of kids, playing around with their computer, on the first results page. For Google. And MSN. And Yahoo. Guess it is time to find another keyword\phrase to work on…

Here we promised and here we deliver. A Brighter Place Lisboa is finally online. And hopefully this will be the second city of many. Tell us what you think - how does the main homepage look like? Any ideas of how to improve it? Suggestions? Feedback? The more, the merrier!

We will continue to add new features, funcionality and updates. This will be a continual beta, always waiting to be improved for your own benefit. And please - participate!

Even though it might seem that we’re not - we are. Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but we’re working on the lisboa version so that it is out as soon as possible. I don’t want to give a date because I can’t predict it that fast. It could be as soon as tomorrow - or as late as… It doesn’t matter - it’s in the works and Brighter Place Lisboa will definitely be launched soon.

In other news, we are trying to work on new content on the main page - so far we’ve been getting help from bcnweek but we want to try and make the visitor a more integral part of the site - power to the users. So once we have more info on that, we’ll let u know..

Stay tuned

OK, so we had to resort to including the so-called “captchas” on our site. But we don’t think it degrades the user-experience on the site - it’s still easy to send a comment, the “captchas” are small, simple numbers. Apparently, more intelligent spambots can read these - but we havent got none of them so far. So for now, it will do!

In other news, we are trying to implement the AdSense banners on our site. Trying to look for what looks best and optimal - both “commercially” and in terms of user-experiece. We will do out best not to “sell out” to Google!

And Brighter Place Lisboa is coming. Soon. We are working on it day and night. We promise! More info when time is closer….

Damn. We managed to reduce the amount of spam, but some other “smarter” ones are still able to post spam on our comments. I don’t get it.. How do they do it? Why do they do it? What’s the fucking point? Anyone?

Anyway, we’ll try and work on that situation. Suggestions are more than welcome…

Finally, we got rid of the FUCKING spam posts that were flooding our site. Any spambot who tries to post a link will be nicely escorted out to www.fuckspambots.com (it doesn’t exist )

In other news, we fixed up the calendar. Looks nice, no text coming out of the box. The Just In section shows gigs and upcoming events in order of which one is the closest to the present date. And the search section is back online again…

Get ready for Brighter Place Lisboa soon…

Props to our designer, Less!

A Brighter Place has been featured by numerous web-design galleries in the past 3 months:

http://www.cssremix.com/archives/934

http://tom.ma/screenblog/www.brighterplace.com

http://www.cssallstar.com/brighterplace/

http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/beta/a-brighter-place

http://www.designmeltdown.com/chapters/Collage/Part2.aspx

Thanks for those and well done LESS!

So we decided to start up a blog. Seeing that everyone and their mom and their dog has one, why not have one ourselves?

We’ll basically talk about what we’ve been up to, features that we’ve been working on, adding, thinking about, bla bla bla. Feel free to give us suggestions or anything else you think is of any sort of interest to us.

This week we’ve been cleaning up the site. It sucks to have two versions: IE 6.0 and firefox. We sometimes find ourselves doing stuff twice, making sure the positioning and looks in both looks good etc etc. So we had to make a choice: got rid of the firefox (.png) version. What this means is that we have .gifs all over and it doesn’t look that cool. But on the other hand, it’s easier to make updates, look at statistics and all that jazz.

Also, we added another feature. One that we had been working on for a while and finally got it together: the photo\video gallery. Not all of the bars, etc have photos but we are in the process of uploading all the ones we do have. And for the ones we dont have, we’re going to be asking you guys to send in your stuff…

AND FINALLY, we have the just in section working properly. Yay! Sooo, we are constantly adding new events in from bcnweek(thanks bcnweek for sending your stuff in every week!), as well as our own research… Just so you know, the stuff that we select to include in the listings is stuff that we think is cool to include. So no paid listings or any of that commercial crap.

Thats probably about it for now. We’ll make an effort to update this whenever we can…