Portland.com is Launched

Subscribe to Elliot's BlogSkip Hoagland and his team have announced the launch of Portland.com, a geowebste geared toward resident and visitors of Portland, Oregon. Portland.com is a part of GeoDomains New Media family of Companies, which includes other great geowebsites such as Atlanta.com, BuenosAires.com, HiltonHead.com, and MyrtleBeach.com.
Press Release:
Nov 17, 2008 – Portland.com today announced the launch of their newly redesigned website that provides information to visitors and residents of Portland, Oregon.  After one month of development and content building, new site offers thousands of additional pages and features.
For visitors to Portland, the new site offers information about attractions, lodging and things to do along with reviews and ratings.   “We want to provide as much information as possible to the tourist to Portland, whether they are traveling for leisure,  visiting family and friends, or for those seeking information for business travel,” said Jeremia Froyland, the Operations and Marketing Director for Portland.com.
“We believe that we owe it to the community and visitor’s to be the one-stop site for any and all information on Portland, Oregon,” Froyland noted. “With the re-launch of Portland.com, we have integrated a myriad of features that make finding information about Portland as easy as possible.  From events to business listings to community interaction, we believe we have put a world of knowledge at a visitor’s fingertips.”
In addition to providing information for tourists and visitors, the new site offers many local and community features that provide information to residents of the “City of Roses.”  Technical & Operations Director Josh Stauffer noted “We have filled the site with useful information about real estate, neighborhoods, community events and you can now find thousands of business that are located in Portland.  With many of the business listings we have not only built in features that allow ratings and reviews, but we also have uploaded descriptions, maps, hours of operation and several other features that provide a great experience for visitors to Portland.com.”
As part of the site’s effort to build and enhance the community, they are also offering free event listings, free business listings, free classified ads and the ability to post and submit your press releases for free.  Stauffer continued “We want to build and support this great city as much as we possibly can.”
Froyland added “Additionally we are very big on supporting the GeoDomain (domains that are geo-specific in nature) industry through our continued support and promotion of Associated Geos, which is a network of city, state and country sites.  By providing visitors to all of our sites with useful, helpful information, each member of Associated Geos is helping build the new frontier for local and visitor information online.
About Portland.com
http://www.Portland.com offers information for residents and visitors of Portland, Oregon on their website.  With information about hotels, real estate, news, attractions and businesses, they cater to online users who seek any information about Portland, Oregon.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

17 COMMENTS

  1. Very nice!!! Do you know if the site is built from scratch, or on one of the directory platforms?
    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Knowing Skip, I am 99.999% sure it’s from scratch. He has a great experienced team working on this.

  2. The following states have a city of Portland KS, ME, OR, IN, CT, TX, AR, CO, FL, TN. This leads to the question about whether this name should have a front page with links to ALL Portland communities?
    Multiple revenue streams are possible by incorporating all Portland communities in all states.
    Something for Skip and team to consider.

  3. @Scott
    Interesting idea – do you know of any sites where this has been done? I have a cityhotels.com where the city exists in several states and have considered doing the same. Might be detrimental to the seo of your main target though.

  4. Scott:
    Believe me, it’s better to specialize when dealing with a pure city Geodomain and promote only one city. Otherwise, you’ll dilute your brand’s effectiveness – especially your local business loyalty. Local businesses won’t advertise if they think you’re promoting another city.

  5. It’s a “pretty site” but it lacks content and seems impersonal.
    I live only 2hrs away from Portland and frequently travel to the city. It’s an eclectic area with many diverse neighborhoods. It’s known for it’s many breweries and unique local nightlife spots.
    Their nightlife section is nothing but drink recipes. You think visitors seeking information about Portland really want to view this? Doubt it. The attractions section is just a short descriptive piece that could have been scraped from any of the thousand other related sites. The photo gallery is just a Flickr plugin with no original photography…
    It seems like I see this a lot with the big geodomains. The content is nothing but scraped filler and they are concentrated more with selling ads first than adding value to attract visitors… should be the other way around!

  6. Clean looking but personally expected alot more…nothing unique about it. Look more of a larger mini site.
    Burbank.com is really well planned out congrats I am sure it will do extremely well and like what you have done with FuelAssistance.com, awesome mini site.

  7. Off subject a little but I was trying to discover how the site was built and discovered the use of http://www.woopra.com/. The site says, ‘Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it’s free!’ Sounds good to me! Any experiences with that?

  8. I was trying to figure out how Portland.com was created and discovered the use of Woopra .com. The site says, ‘Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. And it’s free!’ Sounds good to me. Elliot, have you had any experience with that or is there another method you’d recommend?

  9. @Jeff
    Woopra is just what they use to track visitors — it wasn’t used to create the site.
    There are tons of free web analytic applications out there. Haven’t used Woopra but Google Analytics works just fine 😉

  10. First and foremost congrats on the launch and even if the site isn’t perfect by all standards, it will go through many more stages in order to become successful, in other words rounds of tweaks where things will be “fixed” or totally removed but the most important things is getting everything setup and going live.
    My advice: site lacks focus. Needs to better organize all the resources and present it in a better more structured and consistent engaging way.
    Mike
    http://www.wannadevelop.com

  11. Where are they getting the content from that is showing in all their catagories; Restaurants, Bars, etc.?
    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Not sure about them, but mine is from source.ibegin.com.

  12. Elliot, thanks for posting the release. To answer a few questions:
    – We use Woopra for analytics, it’s awesome!
    – The site was built from scratch, including the directory, and what you see is the result of about 30 days worth of work.
    – We use Google AdManager for the banners
    – AdSense ads we put in place a few things to generate revenue while the site is building, not our ultimate preference, but helps bring in some revenue.
    We appreciate all of the comments and suggestions and will definitely take them into consideration. From where it was and where it is now, we believe it’s a 100 times better especially given our time frame. Again, we’re only 30 days into this and continue to add information every day and build it up.
    Thanks for the comments. Best of luck to everyone 🙂

  13. I can appreciate the hard work that goes into ANY geo domain site. Execution is always open to constructive criticism. Less important is where the site is today. Give them some time and congratulations to the Portland.com staff.
    The suggestion to offer more content is fine, and drilling down to the neighborhood level will help, in time. Here’s one direction where the Portland.com team may want to consider:
    http://pdxhomes.com/
    While it’s a real estate site, if you want to know about Portland, this kind of shoe leather could pay big dividends.
    Again, congrats to Skip and the crew.
    Perchboy

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