Site Suggestions

[MarceeT]

Hi everyone! My husband and I are building a new site for the community we live in (Knoxville, TN), we want this to be more than just your typical business directory or area guide. We kind of want it to grow into an e-zine for the Knoxville area. We will have a business-business directory guide as well as a business-residential guide. However we want to make the site "sticky" to entice visitors to comeback. I'm just curious if any of you live in an area that has an online community guide, if so what do you like / not like about it?

The way we have it now aside from the directories of local businesses, we will have featured articles for each category (ex: a Realtor will submit a resource article about real estate, a tech company will submit one for the business tech section etc). We also will do spotlights on businesses where I will go out and interview them, take pictures, Q&A that type of thing. We will have a promo/ special offer section where any of our advertisers can submit offers. We will have a classifieds section as well as the following:

Games/ Contest area
Local Events area
Local Musicians area where band can submit songs that visitors can listen to
Local Art Gallery showcasing local artist work
Local Bloggers list
Msg Board/ Forums
Free e-mail accts (maybe not right away, we're in the process of getting our own dedicated server to do this)
Cool Places/ New Faces- aticles & snippets pertaining to life around town
Horoscopes
He Said/ She Said- advice column with his & her perspectives

If you can think of anything else that you would like to see on a site like this, I would greatly appreciate it. Before we go live I'll send out the link so you guys can give further feedback.

Thanks in advance!
Marcee Townsend

[justinpowell]

Marcee:

Sounds like you covered a lot of bases and off the top of my head I can't think of anything you might want to add. I created a community site a few years ago mainly as a way to test some new software and programming skills. In the back of my mind I wanted to build the online community, too, but I found it difficult to gain the initial traction since I wasn't really concentrating on it.

To your point, creating continually updated content and other sticky aspects of the site are extremely important. Since my current town (for the next week) is on the Long Island Sound, I found that offering tide tables was a useful, sticky item on the site. I'd try to think outside the box and offer something that is unique to Knoxville - make sure you keep it updated!

I would caution against offering free e-mail accounts in you main domain. If someone abuses it, you could find your site caught in the spam filters, etc. I would consider registering a related domain name and using that for the free e-mail.

Best of luck on the new venture!

[MarceeT]

Thank you Justin for the feedback, it is definitly appreciated. Good point on the e-mail, this is something that we are still up in the air about - we don't really want to offer this, but we have heard that offerig this does help your site, so if we do it we will make sure to use a different domain name.

Thanks again!
Marcee