Steve Shinn

Running a concepting team for News International.

I’ve moved on to a new contract at Reed Business Information managing the implementation of an Editorial Platform. Good luck to all at Which?, it was nice working with you.

The first version of www.shortrent.co.uk is live and a very promising start. We’re already on page one for a number of searches like ’short rent birmingham’. A well executed technical implementation making great use of the MVC framework has enabled us to spin up something very interesting in a short time. SEO activities start in earnest in the next couple of months once we are happy to start pushing the site out.

A lot of activity taking place behind the scenes on www.parkingmanchester.com has enabled me and the offshore team to get the site to position 6 for ‘parking manchester’. Goal is to get to position 3+ in the next 2 months for this highly competitive term, and then roll out the approach to 10 other parking related domains .

We’ve launched the first of a number of airport parking sites as part of developing ParkingAtAirports.net over the course of 2010.

From early January I’ll be moving on from my role at NHS Choices to a new contract at Which.co.uk to deliver the initial phases of a project to develop a site focussed on property and moving house.

I’m pleased to say that myself and a new associate, Cuan Mulligan of Konolabs working on a new platform to run a number of sites which will operate on domains which I have owned for some time. The first (our proof of concept) will be parkingmanchester.com.

The software platform which powers the site will be able to publish availability of airport parking, hotels and other kinds of virtual stock under referral agreements with a number of online booking companies. We plan to launch the first site in late April 2010, and 10 subsequent sites when we have refined the business model and technology.

shortrent.co.uk is currently in development with my friend Tobin Harris of EngineRoom. The business will provide a service which enables landlords to add their own properties for let on a short term basis.  We will also be aggregating serviced apartments and providing a booking service. Over 750,000 people use Google each month to search for the terms ’short rent’ and ’short term rent’

Locallycompared.com, and the 200 sites the platform operates are ranking well in Google. Around 20 businesses a day are signing up and we are receiving over 5000 unique visitors per day across the sites.