Matt launches new city pages from his laptop in Amsterdam
In the wee hours of the morning today, Biznik developer Matt McCormick deployed a whole bunch of new code from his laptop in Amsterdam, where he’s traveling at the moment. John Adair woke up about the same time because of news helicopters hovering over his house (covering a fatal fire in his Capitol Hill block) so he immediately jumped in and started fixing the few bugs that inevitably accompany this kind of launch. By the time I woke up with a 2am flight hangover from San Francisco earlier the same morning, I was happy to see a major new feature up and running on Biznik.com: new city pages! And business categories, which we’re really excited about. These are changes Matt in particular has been working on for more than a month, so I want to send out a big thank you to him. And explain what the changes will mean to you.
In a nutshell, the changes are designed to improve the quality of search results, make city pages more relevant to local communities, and make Biznik members more findable by category. Let’s take a closer look, first at the new city pages.
New City Pages
On the old version of the site, you could select your city, and then, by selecting the Members tab, you could see a list of the most active members within a default radius of 50 miles of the selected city. That worked pretty well when Biznik had just a few thousand members, but not so much now that Seattle alone has almost 8,000 members. We still want to reward the most active members by making them the most visible, but with the addition of categories, there are now many, many ways to rank highly on Biznik. The city pages now also list the most popular event hosts, the ambassadors for a given community (except in Seattle, which has no ambassadors), and shows at a glance how many members are in a community, how many needs are listed, and how many events are upcoming.
Business Categories
You probably noticed that, upon logging into Biznik for the first time after we made the update, you were forced to select a category that best describes what you do. If you’re not happy with the categories, just pick the closest one, then visit your profile, where you’ll find that Active and Supporting members can add more categories, or even make up your own. Active members can have two categories; Supporting Members can select up to four, and create their own. We’re hoping that these category pages really help you get noticed on search engines, so choose your category wisely, and consider upgrading to create your own category.
Here’s a video, under 3 minutes that explains how to add categories to your profile.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Hello from Amsterdam! I actually wanted to make one really quick clarification to what Dan was saying about adding brand new categories of your own. At the moment, only Supporting Members are allowed to create new categories. However, both supporting and active members can belong to more than one category (2 for active members and 4 for supporting).
I also wanted to let everyone know there was about an hour period after the launch where things weren’t quite stable on the site. For all of you that endured this transition, thank you for your patience.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I LOVE this! Thank you Matt – you are so awesome! It’s fun to see you as a Biznik employee now after having some meetups with you and such.
Good stuff. Thank you so much for making the Biznik website THAT much more cooler!
Thanks to John, Dan and Lara too, of course!!