[icunurse]

Have you made your own webpage to try and adopt? I have seen people who have had luck with it, but no one that I know personally. How did you set it up? Did it work? Any tips?

We have an active license, but kinda just want to network this time vs using an agency. We're in IL.

Thanks!

[JustCourtney]

I made a site for us to use when networking - much easier and then trying to write a gigantic email explaining it all, and we figured more likely that people would forward it on, KWIM?

In the end, I got it up and running about 8 hours before we got "the call", so we never even sent it out to anyone! Once we have our baby home, we are planning on using it as a site to post pics and share happening with family across the country.

I designed the site myself using my mac, and hosted with godaddy. I am not at all technical, and managed without much trouble at all.
Please feel free to PM with any questions you might have. Best of luck!

Courtney

[mg1970]

I had a personal website already and I purchased a separate domain. I can't remember what it cost but it was very reasonable.

I have done web development in the past (I am a software developer) so it was easy.

I've sent out networking emails, 2-page brochures, business cards and full profile books to various people and all include the website address. It's a place that people can go to see the full long version of the profile and all the contact info for us.

Some things I learned:
1) I made the phone number a graphic instead of text. That way it does not show up in search results.

2) I put meta tags in for indexing/search then signed into google and learned more about meta tags.

3) I put click through trackers on all the buttons and links to other pages within my site so that I could see how many times someone opened certain pages or clicked certain buttons.

M

[Celesyee]

We created a website and were successful...indirectly. I say indirectly because we replied to an ad via email on heybobo.com for a specific situation and included our webpage address. I followed up with an email, but was told that birthmom already chose a family. 2 days later the agency called because the chosen family was ineligible due to HS problems and birthmom already looked at our website and chose us for an already born situation.

We used freewebs.com to create our website and included everything our hard profile had. On every page I had our contact information but in bold red letters that we were only approved to adopt domestically...that helped weed our international scams.

[mg1970]

I have a few recommendations.

This is a very affordable web hosting service with lots of features.
Web site Hosting by Dot5Hosting

This is a very affordable 800# service with lots of features. It is $2/mo + 6 cents a min for calls.
Accu800 | 800 Number | Toll Free Number | International Call Forwarding | Fax Number

Also, if you want to keep your information non-identifying you need to make sure you use non-identifying information when registering your domain. Otherwise anyone can look up your URL on Whois.net - Domain Names to see your name, address, phone number and anything else you used to register your account. Your web hosting service might say you need to pay extra to have "privacy" but all you have to do is figure out who owns your domain (may not be the hosting service you bought it from) then log in to their site and change the who is info to something non identifying.

M

M

[icunurse]

Thanks, everyone! Does anyone know if any f these sites to build your webpage allow your site to be found through a search on google, yahoo, etc? I'm not a computer person, so please bear with me and my questions

[mg1970]

I haven't figured out how to get my web page to come up in general adoption searches. I've made some recent changes to the keywords and I am waiting for google to reindex it.

If you enter our first names it comes right up.

I think the website is not going to get random google traffic. You will need to work with an advertiser to list your website or rely on networking. There is a place in Adoption.com - Information on International, Domestic, Child & Agency Adoptions, Stories, Laws but I don't think there are a lot of emoms looking there. I think it is mostly paps and facilitators/agencies posting.

M

[mg1970]

Here is something interesting if you are considering online advertising.

Here is a list of the top sites that do advertising for adoptive couples, listed in order of traffic. You can go to each site to compare fees and policies (i.e. family structure).
Alexa - Sites in: Lists*of*Families

And, if you want to look at the trends in web traffic look here (i.e. parentprofiles.com) -- you can add other sites to the page for a comprehensive look.
parentprofiles.com - Traffic Details from Alexa

Also, I have been reading about how to get traffic to your site. According to Google the way they rank their listings is by
1) The importance of your site based on hits
2) The importance of sites that link to your sites

Therefore it is pretty hard to get your personal website to compete with these sites based on random google searches. However if you link your site to one of these sites you are more likely to see your site climb the list. There are also webmaster tools on Google and Yahoo that you can use to make sure that your meta tags and keywords are working for you, and to make sure that pages you don't want to be indexed are left out of the search engines.

M

[BrandyHagz]

Also remember Alexa only aggregates their stats based on users who visit a site who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. Do you have the Alexa toolbar installed? I know I don’t nor do any of the people I know/interact with…

The only accurate way to get stats is to ask the ‘company’ you are interested in using. Every website that offers the service should be able to provide you with information regarding their stats.

Third parties like this are often not showing a clear picture of the actual information based on hitlogs etc – they are ‘estimating’.

Just throwing that out there – because there are also services like the one listed above that offer rank for a fee (which translates into ‘make my site look bigger/heavier/more traveled than it really is, to attract more people).

There is nothing wrong with research – just make sure you do a lot of it

[elledarcy]

We just set up a family website through www.blogger.com. It was very, very easy. I didn't run it as a "we are looking to adopt blog," but it had info about my DH and I and I posted about once a week with photos and info about our families and what we were doing that we (trips we took, fun things we did, etc.)

We then put the URL address in with our agency profile so e-parents could get some more info on us if they wanted to. We also gave the address to family members so they could check in and see what we were doing and how the adoption was going.

Now, I use it to post weekly updates about our DD in case her bio family wanted to check it out (they don't really, but I don't think they're that tech savvy). I like the blog format, because it’s kind of like a journal of your experiences that you’ll always have instead of a website you change constantly.