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Building relevant and useful sites for neighborhoods
By Bill Day | October 8, 2007
How do you cover a landscape as fragmented and targeted as the 42,000+ neighborhoods/ZIP codes that exist in the U.S.? And what needs to be done locally versus done centrally to ensure a solid consumer experience? As a company that owns ZIP Code Web sites covering most of the U.S., we are dealing directly with the challenges and opportunities that come with building highly relevant and useful local sites covering each of the ZIPs.
My take is that having a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in a particular neighborhood ALWAYS takes precedent. A site can look great, be well laid out and have solid resources but if it isn’t in touch with what’s going on in that community at that moment, it’s a lost cause. In the case of local, the need to stay “close to the customer” is never so true.
So you need to be current and in touch with what’s going on. Where do you start with such an effort? In big cities, where more people exist to “justify the site” and people tend to have more anonymous relationships? Or in small towns, where people are more tightly knit but the potential for audience is smaller in the short-term? Answer: we don’t know yet, but look for us to try both and see what works. Frankly, I think both of the prior characterizations are a bit stereotypical. Stay tuned, we will let you know as we learn!
October 8th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
[…] Day writes for Marchex a post titled “Building relevant and useful sites for neighborhoods.” How do you cover a landscape as fragmented and targeted as the 42,000+ neighborhoods/ZIP […]