Agile Eco Development
October 2nd, 2006, By Duncan Gough
There’s a new ecolocal on the block. By the time you read this there should also be an ecolocal.com as well as an ecolocal.co.uk.
That change is significant – we started as a .co.uk with a focus on UK-specific local news. During our initial launch period, though, it became clear that a large number of our users were from outside of the UK. After some hunting around, we managed to cobble together country data from the United States and Australia, with a few more countried to follow, possibly. Hence the .com address.
As a result of this, Ecolocal version 2 now sports the ability to create multi-national local news. On top of this, we’ve created a global discussion forum, that obviates the need to localise your conversation. Again, our experiences in the early months of ecolocal were that plenty of news wasn’t tied to a particular location. Certainly a lot of the inspiration for these decisions came from the good people over at Zaadz, for which we send our humble thanks!
And finally, ecolocal now has a new look and feel. I’m a fan of the last ecolocal design but it needed work. We focussed too much on trying to display as much as possible to users and the pages ended up messy as a result. From the new home page our intention should be fairly clear – less is more. We’ve struggled over the placement of ads, often removing them altogether, but now they have their place without interrupting the flow of the page. The ads are important to us as we’re ultimately in a great position to offer location-based advertising cheaply to local businesses. We’ve also included a couple of nice images, something that significantly brigtens the site. For this we have to thank Daily Candy for the inspiration and iStockPhoto for the images.
If you want to talk to me about ecolocal, please do get in touch.