Answer: Abuelo’s in Rogers, AR
I haven’t blogged here in a while, and it’s because our little real estate tools creation engine, Tasman Labs, was acquired by GoPickle.com. Therefore, I haven’t been freelancing under the Semaphore, LLC banner for a few months now. Instead, Vanguide is now a part of the Webtown Media mix of small business websites, and I’ve been designing our next generation of online tools. Well, it’s finally time to journal what I’ve been up to, because it’s so darn cool.
Just two weeks ago, we took the wraps off of our new Local Business Directory, the new GoPickle.com. GoPickle.com has always served as a super-local yellow pages. But in addition to a completely revised backend, now, local businesses can upgrade their listings for themselves. Think of merchantcircle.com without the spam and social networking fluff.
So with the above in mind, we set out to design the best UI experience we could, both for searchers and business users. Our first thought: “Use a map!” it’s intuitive, it’s not too new, and it looks friggin cool.
We quickly ran into the problem of consistent-height headers, footers, info panes, and all the other data that makes a yellowpages website. Our solution: make it all movable! You can see how it works on a search results page for Restaurants in Rogers, Arkansas
With our design, we avoided the persistent-size problem because now you can scroll the extra stuff out of the way, and the map will stay put. Traditionally, either you have to sacrifice your details display OR you have to sacrifice your map size. We get the benefits of both.
The effect has a ton of benefits for our business customer. Compare our customer page:
To what their page looks like on the competition out there. Notice how much room there is above for photos, description, etc; now notice how small and cramped the actual business information is on all the following pages:
- http://www.insiderpages.com/b/3709734355
- http://www.yellowbook.com/profile/abuelos-mexican-food-embassy_1493600708.html?addressId=0
- http://national.citysearch.com/profile/41371105/rogers_ar/abuelo_s_mexican_food_embassy.html
- http://local.yahoo.com/info-26852378-abuelo-s-mexican-food-embassy-rogers
- http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/139/913535/restaurant/Fayetteville/Abuelos-Mexican-Food-Embassy-Rogers
- http://www.superpages.com/bp/Rogers-AR/Abuelos-Mexican-Food-Embassy-L0112745362.htm
One more consideration: we’re future-proofing our design by making the layout get better as screen resolutions continue to get larger. When you get a new computer with a bigger monitor, you can still make your web browser full-screen and not be afraid of missing all the tiny details, surrounded by boxes and extremely large margins of unused space.
So that’s it. The above is live now, but there is still a lot more on the way.
