Posted by Back in 2012 I created a website for listing machine shops based in the US. One goal was to help machine shop owners by providing a free searchable database for their listings. The other goal was to see if I could create the code for a custom online database. Back then, I had ambitions of becoming a web designer. Databases are necessary to run web-based applications, such as bulletin boards, content management systems, and online shopping carts. I had a friend at a previous job who had a successful website that listed areas of interest for each State in the US. The amount of ad revenue his website generated each month was surprisingly good.
I was able to complete the code for my database and the web pages needed to manage and display the data. One of the main features is the ability to search by keyword, region, State, or shop size. There is also a map on the home page where you can click one of five regions to start a search. Over the years I added a cost estimator, and mobile search for cell phone users. At first interest was good and I would get several requests from machine shops each week to be added to the list. I review each request before adding it to the list to maintain consistency. As of today, there are 528 machine shops in the database.
There is competition from similar listing websites and traffic to the site has been impacted by Google’s algorithm changes over the years. Today the website gets between 350 and 500 unique visitors per month. Ad revenue isn’t even enough to cover the cost of maintaining the site. So, I haven’t been motivated to make any major updates in the past five years. I can always tell when the economy is doing poorly because listing requests and web traffic starts to increase. I think this is because shop owners are not busy and have more time to look on the web for ways to advertise their shop. At this point maintaining the database doesn’t take much of my time and annual renewal costs are about $68. I don’t know what the future holds, but I feel satisfied that I achieved my main goal of building an online database.