Name of your website?Assisted Recovery Center of Georgia, Inc.
Your name?
Terry Bruce
Your Location (city, etc)
Savannah
Please give us a short summary of your website?
A non 12-step drug and alcohol detox and rehabilitation program in Savannah, GA which combines cognitive behavioral therapy with anti-craving medications to conquer addiction.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
To provide information about our program 24/7.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
August 2000, we launched this website. It was much cruder back then, but it was a learning process.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
We used the letters from the company's name A)ssisted R)ecovery C)enter of A)merica in Georgia.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
We utilize highly trained licensed counselors who utilize cognitive behavioral therapy with the drug naltrexone (revia) to significantly reduce the chance of relapse among addicts.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
To help as many people as I can recover from drug addiction and alcoholism.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
I haven't had a week off in 5 years. What balance?
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We would build a larger facility with more amenities for our clients and staff.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
That wouldn't be difficult, as the company has developed a good sized network of on-call professionals when we need them.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Staff. For some reason, they keep wanting to be paid.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Competing companies saying either perjorative things about our organization without ever talking to someone about our protocols, or new companies posing as us and using similar language in their literature. I guess "branding" has been the biggest challenge; to define your company first without allowing others with ulterior motives to do it for you.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Longevity. A seven year old site is ancient. Word of mouth. Subscribing to directories.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Jeesh. HTML to Java to CSS to ??? next year. Label photos. Don't label photos. META keywords, no META. Google still doesn't make any sense. You can have a PR of 7 one year and the #1 spot for your keywords, and then you're at 3 and lost somewhere on page 4. Six months later, you're back on top. The constant tweaking to find that SE voodoo was not expected.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
It's 7 now. I hope to keep it running until the internet becomes obsolete. Which is probably next year some time, when Apple releases "iThought."
What is your website address?
Assisted Recovery Center of Georgia, Inc.
[Ed note: thank god someone's not addicted to the "12 step programs"! haha -Wilbur]