Things Can Only Get Better

Things have never been great here at 101 Christian Singles, but yesterday, Thursday 27th July 2014 was the worst day we have ever had here at 101 or Fusion101 as it has been known till now. The website brought in a total of £20 from its advertising! A total disaster when you consider it once (around 2008 when we first aded advertising to the site) would bring in up to £130 per day. It has been in steady decline since then and for the last year only brought in around £30 per day. Why am I telling you this? Why cover it up? If it was my fault I may be a little embarrassed to say so but since my hands have been more or less tied since starting 101 so I was unable to rectify problems – I’m not.

The problem is that much of the site and its basic features and services have not worked properly or at least intermittently over the years. A year ago a major problem occurred when I change the password on the server. Because of the way it was set up doing this broke many things on the site including user deletion, member email notification (telling them when they receive mail) and other super important features of the site and keep it running smoothly.

101 has also had a downturn revenue since 2007 for a number of reasons including the fact that Google itself has earnings that are down 25%, people using other social networks like Facebook and Twitter etc apart from the fact that the site never works properly and offers very few features and has had no new features added since it started around 2000.

One good thing that happened when I gained full access to the server in 2012 was I was able to quickly in three months put up a new site. It was 12 years late but better late than never. However one problem here was that the site now contains far less active users and over 30% less advertising than the old site again causing problems with revenue.

Now perhaps the only positive thing I can say about this is that there are a number of very clear reasons why this is the case as many things on the website have not been working properly for years and several crucial parts broke when I gained access to the server, for instance; members have not been receiving notification emails password emails approval emails and so on for years but now this had completely stopped. So people didn’t even know they had waiting mail all their profiles had been approved.

Secondly members have not been able to delete themselves for several months which has caused major problems and had is reported to email blacklisting organisations meaning that any emails that do go out are definitely not received.

I’ve tried to fix this several times and paid good money but the last attempt only resulted in the deletion of over 1000 active users by accident causing me no end of trouble so I disabled the develops code and it remains to be fixed. Meanwhile, I have been answering 100s emails from annoyed members and manually recreating their accounts. I am also back to deleting members manually which is very time-consuming.

All these issues and many others I haven’t mentioned have had a profound effect on the usage of the site. Whereas once we had anything up to 800 users logged in at one time to 101, we are now down to a maximum of 400 but most of the time around 300 of the busiest time and on average around 120.

This is a disaster and things have never looked so bad at 1:01 as they do now. The good news is that I do have finally the new site and a content management system – two crucial parts to any website which I’ve wanted for over 12 years. In fact, the only reason I’ve got time to write this article is because I’m dictating it vocally into my iPhone exclamation! I am used to doing everything the long way and this is truly the first amazing thing that 101 has ever had that I can say really works!

The Only Way is Up

The only good thing about all this is I have always known exactly where the problems lie, but been unable to do anything about them. Now with access to my server this situation has changed – at least there is now light ahead and all I need to do is stay strong (the stress of these issues means I regularly want to give up) and fix them.

One major good thing is that my health is 10 times better than it has been over the last 10 years. I no longer have pain in my lower abdomen and permanent neck related migraines and swollen eyes from too many hours at the PC so if I keep my resolve it is now possible to fix the sites.

It remains to be seen whether I can actually pull 101Networks out of the dumps and survive, or wether I’ll need to go back to where I was in 2000 with a full-time job running this part time until it makes enough revenue for me to concentrate on it fully.