Michelle Henery looks at a travel website that helps to keep people in touch around the world

THE endless postcards, letters and e-mails you feel obliged to send while travelling can often loom as a daunting prospect, eating up valuable travel time while you hunt down stamps or try to remember a huge list of addresses.

However, lain Row, a 27-year-old entrepreneur from Milton Keynes, has developed a solution - My World Journal, an online service that allows travellers to create a personal website to record their adventures and experiences that family and friends back home can easily access.

He says: "I had wanted to get a leaving present for a close friend who was going travelling, but he had limited space. I was working as a web designer at the time and decided to build him a website that he could easily update while on his travels. I got so much positive feedback from his friends, since every time he updated the site they automatically received e-mails. It was then that I decided to make it into a fully-fledged e-commerce enterprise."

His expertise as a web developer saved him more than £25,000, which he would have had to pay a designer to write such a program. But because he was starting his business at the time the dotcom era was winding down, he invested only £1,000 from his savings to post the site.

"I launched it very low-key in December 2002 since it was in the wake of the dot-com bust. Because there were so many stories of companies losing a lot of money, I was unsure whether to invest a lot."

With no budget for advertising, Mr Row handed out flyers and took advantage of any free promotion he could get. Yet despite the encouraging initial response, after six months he had yet to land one sale.

"It was the hardest thing I've had to cope with. It caused many sleepless nights. Because the product was so unique, it was difficult to market.

I'm still kicking myself for not realising sooner that I could offer a free seven-day trial to new users. The free trial allows them to experience all the features, and see how easy it is to use, with no commitment. I got my first sale within a week."

He says that he should have carried out better research on the prices that people would be prepared to pay. "For a backpacker, £40 was two nights' accommodation. The expense of the site was a luxury they didn't need."

Mr Row also found a regular source of potential customers from the information website GumTree.com, which permits free posting to its bulletin boards. It was soon responsible for many of his referrals.

For a yearly subscription My World Journal allows travellers to build a website that can be updated without the need for web-design skills or special software.

Travellers can choose the Standard package for £9.99, Premium (£19.99), which adds a guestbook and the ability to alter the colour scheme and banner images, or Premium Photo (£29.99), which provides a photo gallery on to which pictures can be uploaded.

All users can mark their location on an interactive map. Whenever updates are made, e-mails are sent to friends and family automatically . At the end of a trip, a permanent copy of the journal can be stored on to CD.

Yet just when Mr Row thought he was in the clear, an internet "worm" destroyed the database and back-ups on his host provider, and deleted all of the journals. "At the time I had 60 customers and I had to tell them that it was all gone. It was a disaster. I offered them their money back or two years' free [usage]. I was delighted that over 90 per cent stayed."

Mr Row now has his own dedicated server, which offers a faster service, and he also stores the journal information in three ways. He thinks that this back-up strategy is one of the main reasons why a traveller would opt for his service rather than that of a rival.

There are about five other personal travel websites, which are free of charge, but they are funded by advertising. Mr Row says: "Most people don't want ads popping up on their websites. Also, if the site crashes, there is no incentive to bring it back up immediately. If my site crashes, it affects my livelihood."

So far, he has just over 100 users with 5,000 subscribers, but he hopes that the site will quickly gain further customers. "The site promotes itself," he says. "Right now, the service makes £2,500.a year, which just covers running costs."

Most of his clients are under the age of 30, but 30 per cent of his customers are older than 50. "People in their fifties and sixties are now the second biggest gap-year market."

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