I’ve been talking about building a site for the London 2012 Olympics for awhile now but have only really put a lot of work into it over the last few days. The first day was hugely productive here in Brisbane. With my friend at work and the house to myself I had no distractions and set up almost the entire navigation system. The second day was a bit of a bust with the internet not working all day but I thought of a few new ideas, wrote a bit of the content and did as much work offline as possible. The third day saw me in a hotel on the Gold Coast while my friends were at a wedding and I hammered out most of the pages and just need to fill them with content that doesn’t really exist yet because its so early.
The result after only three full days is a site nearing completion that I think will be really helpful for people heading to the Olympics in 2012. The reason I think I was able to hammer out a good site in such little time is that, having been to the Olympics in both Athens and Beijing, I know what sorts of things I was looking for and I am assuming that people going to London will be after the same information.
I’ve decided to steer clear of a blog format and don’t want to be an up to the minute news source or site with the information of every possible athlete as there are people out there that can do that a million times better than I can. I have narrowed my focus to two things I know well — London and the Olympics.
What I Know About the Olympics
Having already been to two Olympics I can think back to all of the information that I wish I would have had before I went. I used this strategy when building backpacking and working abroad sites too and it seems to have worked well. The assumption is that if I am searching for certain information, so are other people. The things I wanted to know before going to Athens and Beijing were all practical: venue location, transportation, dates and fixtures of the events, and cheap but central places to stay. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, I’ve decided to focus on these practical aspects of the Games and leave the sport by sport, minute by minute reporting to the professionals with news teams.
What I Know About London
Having lived in London for five years, I know a fair bit about getting around, tourist attractions, different suburbs, good places to eat and how to do things cheaply. I think the combination of events information with logistical city stuff will be something that people coming to the Games in 2012 will find really useful.
Because the London Olympics has an end date and because of the grey area as far as copyright stuff goes and the possibility of a nasty call from a lawyer one day, I don’t want to put too much work into this site. I’m hoping to launch it once I write a bit more content in a couple of weeks, get it out there into search engine world, and see how things go. I think I’m in this early enough to hopefully reap some rewards down the road without a lot of work from this point.
So if it works… doing what I know well will be a definite strategy in the future.
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