EveryScape Facelift

If you're a long-time EveryScape follower, you'll notice that EveryScape got a little facelift over the weekend. Our homepage has been completely redesigned to better explain what we're all about to new and returning users, along with some key changes in other parts of the site.

As change is sometimes scary and not always welcome (check out what Facebook users had to say about the new Facebook upgrade!) I wanted to explain exactly WHAT we changed and WHY we changed things.

First, our homepage has an entirely new look and feel. Rather than immediately coming to the main portal landing page, where we used to announce what new cities had recently been added and made site visitors select a city to explore, we've broadened the messaging on this homepage. As we have a variety of people coming to our site each day for lots of different reasons, we wanted to be able to offer up different content to support different interests.

Old homepage

The new homepage explains why The Real World Online matters...We bring experiences of businesses and destinations to life online in such a way that online visitors can now confidently choose which restaurant they want to dine in, store they'd like to shop at, hotel they'd like to stay at, museum they'd like to visit. Now, within one click of our homepage, we offer information for business owners interested in capturing their business in The Real World Online, partners interested in using our visual search directory on their own site, job applicants interested in helping us conquer this enormous task. And, in case you were worried, you can still easily get to all of our city content by clicking on the EveryScape Local Search "Explore Now" button OR clicking directly on any one of the cities mentioned in the footer.

New homepage

Once you enter the "Local Search" section of the site, you'll experience a few other enhancements. First, we've organized our Destination selections in the left nav in a way that makes more sense: alphabetically, by state or country, and then by city. Our old navigation where we organized cities based on the order that they had been launched didn't make a whole lot of sense and I'm sure caused quite a few people to hunt and peck to try to find specific destinations.

Our other major enhancement is we now have a "Featured Business" category where we include links to all of the "WebScapes" within that city. A WebScape is the 3D experience of businesses and destinations that allow visitors to virtually walk around as though they were there in real life. You might visit a city that doesn't have a "Featured Business" category...That means that we haven't quite gotten there yet. Remember, building The Real World Online is a pretty massive undertaking so it's going to take us a bit longer to get everywhere.

So what do you think of our facelift? Does it make more sense? Are there things that we changed that you wish we hadn't? Are there things that you'd love to see us change? Let us know!