Loogic English

At last month’s Iniciador in Madrid, Luis Martin Cabiedes said that you have to be prepared because you never know when a project is going to take off (he used the word ‘explode’). In Spain, we have some interesting cases of projects that have ‘exploded’, perhaps the most striking is Tuenti (who decline to comment on the financial aspect of their business). In this group we can also include Trovit, Privalia and BuyVip. Other projects that we follow with attention and ones I can dare to say are about to take off include Red Karaoke (with its WSA competition), Minube (which just received an investment from Caja Navarra), and here is where I would also include 11870.com

I think 11870.com is about to take off and this radical redesign that they have launched could be the detonant.

After the initial shock of seeing the new design on the front page of 11870.com, I spent some time browsing through rest of the site (very much liked the design of the results page) and mostly in thinking how this redesign might affect the future of the website. What I realized is that we are looking here at a redefinition of the message that is conveyed to the new user who has just arrived on the site, the base of all this is a directory of businesses and hence it doesn’t make sense disguising it as a social network. A user who arrives at the site from the search engines or in whatever way has to be able to access all the content on the site, which is only possible in two ways, with a search engine and a directory.

For me, 11870.com is the ideal site to attract traffic from the search engines and relevant geolocalized content. Add to this the fact that the content is generated by the users, and they are continually generating comments which results in the content being updated with a lot of frequency. The new front page of the site should serve precisely to tell Google that it’s going to find a lot of content for indexing. Hence the conversion from a design that highlighted things to one that serves as an access to all the information available on the site.

Allow me to conclude with another novelty that seems to be quite important: now in 11870.com, it is possible to reserve a table at restaurants (agreement with El Tenedor), reserve rooms in hotels (agreement reached with Booking.com) and reserve rural rentals (agreement with TopRural).

Also commented by Jesus Encinar and François Derbaix.

1) It must have been a very difficult decision that of changing the name of a web project after more than a year of launching and when it’s already relatively well known.

2) I liked Properazzi, but it’s true that it’s a complicated name. I like Enormo even more though. Without doubt, Yannick Laclau knows how to choose a good name for his projects.

3) Enormo is already available in 30 countries. When a model is tried and tested and the growth is based mainly on traffic coming from Google, launching the project in other countries is a natural way to expansion.

4) I love the lack of design. It’s as if they had done the design thinking according to my taste. And take a look at the advertising, where is it? A fantastic integration of Adsense Premium, that other vertical search engine companies focused on real estate classified ads, also appear to be achieving.

5) Seasonal advertisements is an option which has been added recently I think and that competitors Trovit and Nuroa don’t have as yet. Since Idealista acquired a stake in Rentalia and included it in its content, this option will end up being offered by all the vertical search engines.

6) Now that they have changed their name, wouldn’t they also have considered diversifying in other subjects? Especially, the theme of classified adverts for jobs seems to be working well for other search engines of this type.