Several months ago, I blogged about Fred Mercaldo and his team at Scottsdale.com who were launching their City in a Box platform, which they already successfully on sites like Sausalito.com, Chandler.com, Mesa.com, Tempe.com, and others. The sites are lauded for their contemporary look and ease of use, while the team behind the platform handles marketing and development duties.
Yesterday I received word from Fred that his team has launched Palermo.com, a domain name owned by domain investor Steve Kaziyev of NamePursuit.com. I’ve spent some time looking through the site with envy, and I think it looks great. The site has a lot of travel information, and visitors can make hotel reservations and learn about the city sites. Since Italians tend to use the .it ccTLD in their domain names, they are targeting American tourists with this site.
One of the challenges with a site like this will be finding local advertisers in Palermo. Restaurants, hotels, galleries, and other tourist attractions are presumably the target of Fred and his team, and it will be fun to watch the site progress. IMO, this is where the City in a Box platform outshines anything similar.
I am very impressed with the quality of the site, and I am hoping Steve and Fred will share results down the road. I am in talks with Fred and the Scottsdale.com team about developing one of my geodomain names, and I am sure I will share more information if and when something happens.
Congrats to Fred and Steve on this exciting launch.
Nice looking site but I wonder why they did’nt make the top hotel link open up in a new window and go straight to the Hotels in Palermo results instead of Booking.coms home page ? (I think they call it something like deep linking)
I’v seen plenty of other people do that so I assume it is allowed.