Developing Web 2.0 Yellow Pages
May 15th, 2007 by choim
For a year and half, I’ve been involved with the development of BoomYEAH, an interactive yellow pages designed to help people find local businesses.
It’s been a difficult journey as the company went through a lot of ups and downs. Recently, we finished incorporating approximately 28 millions business listings for all 50 states (before, we were only open in Utah) and decided to focus more on recommendations.
It’s interesting how you start a business and end up with a business that has a different feel and look. The site BoomYEAH went through a lot of changes, although the purpose of the site has never changed.
We first started out with a very basic design (the design I came up with after I came home one day and sketched using MS paint), went through a major evolution last summer when we decided to add complete listing and did so for Utah, and then went through a second evolution (just very recently) where I believe the site became really Web 2.0. Before the second revolution, we may have thought the site was Web 2.0, but it really wasn’t.
Now, the site uses a tagging system and will soon go into major marketing and sales campaigns. Although the local market has been a hard market for many entrepreneurs, there is definitely a need to build a better system to help internet users find local businesses. Our goal with BoomYEAH is to provide tools for those that are looking for local businesses and also provide tools for local business owners to reach out to those who are looking for local businesses online.
Yelp, Insiderpages, and Google of course are doing a fantastic job, but we believe there are more that we can do to help both internet users and business owners.
If you have any suggestions on how the ultimate yellow pages should be, please leave your comment here. Perhaps, with your help, we can solve some of the frustrations in this market.
How are you addressing linking? What kind of marketing effort will be needed to get the local small business owner to support this?
Bob, Thanks for your comment. For the free description and website link, we plan to do a no follow link.
For marketing, we have millions of fax numbers that we will be sending to business owners (to have them update their information and upload a free description). We also plan to partner with internet marketing companies and chambers of commerce, give them incentives to promote BoomYEAH to their members.
Any thoughts?