The northeast corner of Glencoe is home to a Frank Lloyd Wright subdivision (video) and bridge, a Keck & Keck subdivision (video), allegedly illegal chickens and home-invading chipmunks.
We know that many of you are considering a move beyond the city. Within the next few weeks we’ll be expanding YoChicago’s coverage into the North Shore and other nearby suburbs. You can count on Yo for stories about homes and architecture, but for chickens and chipmunks – in the absence of a suburban EveryBlock – check out AOL’s Patch, Pioneer Local, and TribLocal.
Is this in response to the new launching of Curbed? I used to love the fact Yo seemed to focus most of its energies on the central parts of Chicago. The movement towards the suburbs is disappointing.
Longtime,
We’re hoping the redesign won’t disappoint you. One of the design goals is to make it easy for people to focus on the Chicago-only content, or on specific suburban regions, as they may see fit.
The makeover of YoChicago has been in the works for some time, and the Curbed launch has no bearing on it. Curbed will do a number of things very differently from Yo, and we expect that most of our readers will also visit Curbed, and that many of Curbed’s readers will visit us. We hope to see even more sites covering Chicago real estate.
Our suburban expansion is not something that’s new. We launched NewHomeNotebook (NHN) about two years ago as the vehicle for that expansion. The plan at the time was to phase the Yo audience over to the NHN site, which was built on the Ning platform with a substantial amount of custom programming.
Several things became clear over time, the most important being that Ning’s functionality, usability and stability did not evolve as we expected it would. Some of our features wound up in silos that were masked from substantial parts of the audience due to their appearing on different platforms.
Yo had focused heavily on new construction and it was anticipated that NHN also would. The new construction market has almost completely collapsed, triggering a need to expand our coverage of resales and rentals. The new site should facilitate that coverage expansion, in addition to the geographic expansion.
The objectives of the redesign include drawing more attention to our videos and photography, making the video archives and images more easily accessible and searchable, and providing a way to integrate and expose people to what we expect to be a growing body of useful real estate and neighborhood video from other sources.
The new site will also include a major focus on guides – pages of advice, video, images and lists focused on very specific topics that, hopefully, will enable people to make more informed decisions about selecting their next neighborhood and buying or renting their next home. Readers will have the ability to comment on those guides, and we expect to incorporate the most useful of those comments in the guide content itself.
If the revamped Yo doesn’t initially satisfy, please let us know that as forcefully as possible. We realize that many people have less than zero interest in the suburbs – or in the city – and don’t wish to burden them with sorting through irrelevant items.
I’m actually rather disappointed with curbed so far, but maybe that’s because of Yo! (or maybe just because I know Chicago better…). And of course celebrity properties are more frequent and fun there (and LA, see the realestalker for instance).
Sheridan B,
Give Curbed Chicago some time.
The editor, Mark Boyer, is a former Yo guy, and very bright and very talented. Launching a new site isn’t easy. Once Mark has had time to settle in, I’m confident Curbed will become one of the bright spots in Chicago real estate on the Web.