What should a Charleston guide website look like?

15 Feb 2010 by Sean in Charleston Uncategorized

Chucktown Deals has been around in SOME form for about a year now.  Now that goes back to when I just finished making a logo and sketched out the layout of the pages on graph paper.

The site really went live (unofficially) in July 2009.  It was on the slow growth model from the beginning.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one working on a Charleston business directory website.

I’ve found the market for directory sites has been getting crowded with old staples like SCIway, Charleston.com and Charleston’s Finest and a surge of latecomers like Lowcountry Marketplace, GreaterCharleston.com, 843area.com, Chucktown Deals and others.

I’m sure there are plenty of sites out there that I don’t know about just as there are many, many people out there that haven’t heard of most of the sites above.

With so many websites working on basically the same idea, I’m wondering what sets us apart.  I’m convinced that we’re all looking at the same process for monetizing our sites: local business advertsing.

Before you yell at me for ignoring The Digitel or the City Paper’s website, I just think that they are not in the same class of website.  Those sites, ReadCharlie and even the Post & Courier’s site are all fundamentally in the realm of journalism.  They might have directories within their bowels, but the face they show the world is traditional journalism in one form or another.

Variations of the Charleston directory model

For a fee, Warren Pepper will make an appearance at your business with a camera crew to profile you on Lowcountry Marketplace.  That’s different than what another site can offer.  There are few local celebrities as well-known as Warren Pepper.

But how much do that have to charge and how many businesses do they have to recruit to make a profit?

SCIway has been around forever.  In internet terms, they are the dinosaur in the room.  They were innovative when they started, but their model appears EXTREMELY outdated.  Plus, as big as the site is, it’s too big to move.  They claimed their stake but cannot shift to a better model without a Herculean effort.

GreaterCharleston.com has nearly 2,000 pages indexed by Google as of this writing.  Meanwhile, when you search site:greatercharleston.com to see which pages are indexed on Google, the second listing links to this page which is just placeholder text.  What’s up with that?

That page is dated December 23, 2008—more that a year ago—but the site still has “BETA” on its logo, meaning they still don’t consider the site officially launched.

I actually like their site more than most in this category, but it suffers from the same problem as SCIway and Lowcountry Marketplace: it’s trying to be everything to everyone as a Charleston web directory.

Look at Charleston.com.  Sure, they spent a ton of money to purchase that domain name.  But why does their website suck?  You would think if you owned charleston.com you would capitalize on it and make something really valuable with all the instant credibility having that domain offers.

Last, check out Charleston’s Finest.  Sadly, Charleston’s Finest is probably the least attractive and least user-friendly of these websites.  But they’ve been around a while, so their site has a lot of Google cred and therefore traffic.

Where does that leave Chucktown Deals in the Charleston directory world?

As far as I can tell, each of these sites wants to be a directory to all Charleston has to offer.  You search by category, and these sites will have every business in town within that category—or at least that appears to be the goal.

The original idea with Chucktown Deals was to get every business in town to place a page under each category and give their best deal.  You know, like Moes’ Wednesday night half-price burger deal.  I wanted to be the site where people went to find out about specials.  In the process, participating businesses would find new customers because inevitably, people would stumble upon new places and be tempted to try them.

But as Chucktown Deals evolved, I became interested in becoming more of a travel guide so people could find out about recreational activities in town.  At the same time I wanted to write features stories about interesting people, places and events in this great city.

Now, I’m questioning my model again.  Why?  I feel like Chucktown Deals might be too much like what so many other people are putting together.  I don’t want to compete with Warren Pepper.  I don’t want to compete with Charleston.com.  Even if I work like crazy and do what they do better, I’m still doing what they do.  Am I different enough?

Ultimately, what can I do to be truly different?

I conclude this post with a question.  I don’t have the answer yet.  My fundamental strategy is to keep things simple.  I’m leaning towards the idea that I need to do less.  By doing less, I’m making my idea simpler.  Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, should I just try to be one simple thing to just one set of people?  If so, how should I set limits and boundaries?