FoundLocally interface improvements: JUMP Feature

the Jump Feature is a two-click process

This week, we updated our look & feel, adding some colour. Everybody's doing a "simple" (but bland) white interface now... we wanted to keep ahead of the curve. See www.FoundLocally.com  as well as each of the community websites.

As well, we made our JUMP feature more prominent. We've had it for the past year, but it seem ed largely lost and ignored. By replacing a word-description with the "Bunny" icon, we figured people will discover it, and be amused by the self-explanatory pop-up window, and is "boing" sound effect.

The JUMP feature works for any page on the site, whether content or a search results page. Check out movie listings in nearby FoundLocally communities or search for a store or restaurant located nearby.

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FoundLocally says Bilingualism is dead in Canada!

June 19, 2012 Calgary, AB. FoundLocally.com Media Inc, which has long been asked about making its site bi-lingual, is excited to announce that it has added omni-lingual translation to all its websites. Statistics Canada says there are almost as many non-official language speakers as there are French speakers Now, FoundLocally’s websites are available in not only French, but a total of 57 languages, adding innovative programming to integrate with Google’s Translation capabilities.

 These languages are now supported on all FoundLocally websites: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish. It not only translates, but displays the content in the correct foreign keyboard/fonts.

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Are you ready for Facebook's New Timeline View for your Business Page?

Facebook just finished revamping individual users’ pages to the new “Timeline” view. Now its time for all the business Facebook Pages to get a new design, which will be forced upon you by On March 30, 2012, whether you are ready or not.



The biggest advantage of this new look is you get to have more control of the appearance of your business page than before, where the “facebook” logo and blue stripe dominated the page. Now you can use a graphic or photo to take up most of the part of the screen. On the minus side, those who do NOT update their Facebook Pages will have a crappy looking page, with their old Profile Image chopped to 180 pixels square. Those that invested in taller vertical images under the old look & feel, will need to re-invest into a more flexible wider banner.

This presents an significant product promotion and brand building opportunity—even opportunities. Why just tell people you are launching an new product, when your Facbook Page’s Profile Image can be updated, and you can comment about the new photo, making your Status Update newsfeed more interesting and relevant?

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About Todays Internet Blackout to Protest SOPA/ PIPA laws

Why are a number of websites going dark today, in protest of the SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”, in the US House of Representatives and PIPA (a very similar “Protect IP Act”, in the US Senate) legislation?

These two Acts purport to block websites using copyrighted content without permission, it also punishes sites linking to other sites that actually use copyrighted content without permission. That means a site linking to pirated music, as part of a story about pirated music could be held in violation, and that a US judge in a US court could force US search engines to stop linking to such content, and even force ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to block both the content, the website hosting the content, and the search engines linking to the content.

And without a well-thought-out (or even a just) legal appeal, this legislation leaves little room for opposition, appeal or recourse. “So much for the First Amendment,” and freedom of speech. It also means US courts can block international sites or international search engines, because after all, much of the internet is managed from there.

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What should I use for my Logo?

We have always provided a place for businesses to include their logo with their listing, and in the past few months, we’ve made it much easier to upload. It now it works just like Facebook’s image upload.

There’s no longer any excuse to not have an image with your logo & link listing, as opposed to the default blue ‘click for more info!” button.
 
The question most people phone us to ask advice on is, what image or logo to use that works best. The logo or photo is your best chance for a great “first impression”.

FoundLocally’s search results display 20 at a time, each with their logo. You should try to stand out as much as you can, to improve the odds that your listing is looked at first, or at least among the first.

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Adding a Business in the Greater Toronto Area

FoundLocally.com has a number of directories serving the Greater Toronto Area (The "GTA") for a few years now.

Which Toronto Directory should I add my business to? While many directories lump everyone from Belleville to Brantford north to Barrie as “Toronto”, we—as FoundLocally—like to help consumers find businesses and services right in their own community or neighourhood.

When we were implementing ZIP Code blocking for US-based businesses not close to one of our featured cross-border communities (Niagara Falls, and Sault Ste Marie) , but still trying to add themselves (or by their SEO professionals, add their clients to our high-PageRank directory), we realized we had a similar issue with Toronto-area businesses.

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U.S. Business Listings on FoundLocally?

FoundLocally is designed to help find community information for a number of cities across Canada, and so we are a perfect marketing opportunity for Canadian businesses.

The fact the directory is free, and covers a broad spectrum of economic activity from Business to Business (“B2B”) and Business to Consumer (“B2C”), as well as governments, non-profits and community groups.

The Canadian Falls at Niagara FallsSome FoundLocally sites are cross-border, including Niagara Falls (also featuring Niagara Falls & Buffalo, NY) and Sault Ste Marie (also for Sault Ste Marie, Michigan and the “U.P.”). These sites cover both sides of the border (or river) because that’s the way those communities actually function.

We welcome listings from US businesses, community groups and governments in those cross-border communities!

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Are the Telcos a Fraud on Smartphones?

I have been watching the major Telecommunications companies, who are busy selling consumers on the future of mobile computing, with their sales agents pocketing a hefty up-front commission for locking consumers into those three year contracts. On the other hand, they are doing diddly-squat to help businesses deliver to an ever-more-mobile audience.


A year ago I attended a programming workshop on Creating Mobile Apps, sponsored by Rogers, Bellm and Calgary Technologies Inc (now Innovate Calgary). After two hours of presentations of possibilities and opportunities, I went to each of the sponsors' websites, to see if they had a mobile version, and if they had “auto-detect” (show mobile versions to smartphone browsers, and desktop versions to all others), I found that none, did. I asked them about that, and why these multi-billion dollar corporate sponsors could not do what they were telling all small independent software developers to do? They all sheepishly fled from the stage.

Apparently, nothing has changed over the past year.

Telus screen capture form an iPhone-January 9, 2012Bell.ca screen capture from iPhone - January 9, 2012Rogers.com screen capture on iPhone - Junary 9, 2012
Actual sceen captures of the Telco websites as seen on an Apple iPhone on Jnuary 9, 2012. Look how mobile-ready the companies are themselves.

Here. You try it:

If you are looking at this on your desktop, cut and paste the above URLs into an email to your smartphone (typically to your own email address) and click on the links there, and compare the screens you see!

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New Navigation improvements added to FoundLocally

FoundLocally has made the LOGIN more accessible by making it a pop-up (rather than directing users to a LOGIN page), and made it easier for most users, especially those with a single business listing or a single resume by taking them directly to their info.

We also added a number of small navigation features to enable users to go to the Canada home page, back one page, or send us feedback (by adding a new icon to the Social Media icons grouping).

New Navigation features

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New Look for FoundLocally.com

We have just launched a new version of FoundLocally, designed to be both easier to use, and faster-loading. We thank you for the many suggestions made by our million visitors a month, which were incorporated into this update.
See http://www.FoundLocally.com

The new site design makes the site search more prominent, and moves all menus and actions in to the black, grey and white stripe at the top of the page, replacing the old "tabbed" interface for site navigation and for viewing & updating business listings. We also made the Add Free Listings option and the Login (to update listings) more accessible. We also improved Social Media integration, making it easier to "like" individual pages in over 300 Social Media sites, as well providing as easier access to our Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, and Blog.

We've also added site-wide capabilities including the Popular Links (in each city),. This Page > Nearby (to jump to same feature, feature or search results in nearby FoundLocally communities) and the pop-down Table of Contents which had used the right site panel pretty well since the website's inception. On the FoundLocally.com home page, the white stripe provides a number of pop-downs for the most popular pages around the website.

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