If you have watched much TV in Portland lately, you've probably seen ad's for LivePDX.com. The site is like citysearch, you use it to find restaurants, shopping, etc. So I've done some research, checked out their site a bit, thought I'd post my thoughts for all to read.First thing that I noticed and I think deserves mention is that LivePDX.com is affiliated with Fox12 (KPTV). The parent company is the Meredith Corporation and LivePDX is a pilot project for them...if all goes well they'll launch the same web concept in other cities they serve with local media.
Next thing that jumped out at me was their contact page that implies they employ at least 5 full time employee's.
Finally, while looking through their site I noticed something startling; they only have restaurant and bar information on their site. No shopping, no beauty, no nothing other than food and drink.
At this point you are asking "why this is all important?" Here is my point: with all the money and support they have from their parent company, with 5 full time employee's, this is all they could do?
With all do respect, this site is awful! I couldn't find ANYTHING I was looking for. No exaggeration, couldn't find a thing. Their site implies they have information beyond just food/beverage, but nothing. They don't even bother to say "coming soon" on those pages. The submit page, which allows users to add to their directory, is awful. The page is not specific to the type of business you are submitting, and a submission I made about a month ago is still not showing on their site.
The local search market is so crowded these days, you'd think a big company like Meredith Corp would give it their all. If LivePDX is "their all," I'd sell their stock ASAP.
-Jeff the Great
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6 comments:
I had the same issues when I visited the site. Do you think that the website model is wrong or just the content?
It is both the model and the content.
1. How hard would it be to add content? Time consuming, yes. Hard, no.
2. They layout is awful to begin with. Then, when I click on a category that they apparently don't have content for, I don't even get a "coming soon" message. Furthermore, I have submitted a business, and it has yet to be added to their site.
What are you guys talking about? There is a ton of content on livepdx.com -- the only feature I like about GOBOZ is the google map. There is nothing else there.
Here are my personal issues with LivePDX:
1. cluttered home page..WAY to much going on.
2. Only contains restuarants, though they imply they have other businesses.
3. Poor search functionality
4. they use a tired star rating system.
5. I cant' figure out how to view all restaurants in a particular category (the 'click to expand' doesn't seem to work on the search page)
6. Requiring a review to rate, and a log in to do both = very few reviews. The #1 Restuarant on Goboz has 12 votes and 1 review in only 27 days. On LivePDX that restuarant has 1 rating/review. Which do you trust more?
I could go on and on. Remember this is just my PERSONAL opinion. I believe Goboz is more straight forward, easy to navigate, and more informative.
But let the users be the judge!
OK -- here's the problem I have with goboz -- you can only vote for people, not against. I see the lists of popular places, but it's just a list of 10 places. Not really helpful.
There is a bunch of content on livepdx under shopping, etc, but it's true you have to use the search to access it. The search seems good to me. I can search for anything that is happening this weekend, which I can't do anywhere else. I like the videos from local businesses. I want to know the people I'm doing business with.
Having categories is a good idea, though -- I see your point with that. It would make the navigation a lot easier.
Rating without logging in is a mixed blessing -- it seems like it can lead to spamming. That being said -- ultimately it's the quality of the content. At this point in time, I think Livepdx has better content.
To Anonymous,
I wanted to follow up to your comments on this blog as I totally understand your comments about Goboz.We do have quit abit of content on Goboz.The reason we changed the homepage was due to the amount of content we do have in the business listings section. We felt that having the top 10 and most recent 10 businesses listed would help people visiting the site see more of our business profiles more easily.That being said we may need to work on this as it seems that you were not able to easily navigate our business page I apologize for that if it led to any confusion on Goboz. As for voting,we have built in the ability to Vote businesses down based on consumer beliefs about that business. We have tested it with a small group of users and will be rolling it out soon. We initially believed that giving users the ability to Vote down reviews and comments would be the best feature for business reviews. This way the user community could rally around someones review and vote it down if it was out of line with the general consensus of the users. But we understand why some users would like to be able to vote a business down and as I said earlier this is why we will be rolling out this feature before we launch in Seattle next month.As for video reviews of businesses we are also already done with adding this feature and will be rolling it out in the next month.As for your concerns about spam voting we completely agree that some individuals would want to try and spam the site with votes. When we built Goboz we anticipated this issue and have built Goboz so that only one vote per IP address is allowed. With sites like City search you can vote as often as you like which negates any trust someone might have about there voting system. I hope that this answers any concerns you may have with Goboz . We will continuously be changing and rolling out new features as we launch in the majority of towns and cities across the U.S in the coming months.
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