Where’s Good?

Back in May 2006, I launched the first version of Where’s Good, which I planned/hoped would be a restaurant review site where people could become reviewers, recommend their favourite places to other people, and possible organise events and meetups based around those places.

To date, it really hasn’t worked out all that well. It’s a nice idea (or at least I think so, and so did some of the people I spoke to at the time) but it just hasn’t taken off. There are a couple of other ‘restaurant review’ sites around now, such as Hardens (which seems to be getting most of the business) but at the same time there were a couple of others that were due to launch around the same time as Where’s Good, but have never got past the holding-page stage. (For example, the Where Shall We Eat site, which just never seems to have done anything.)

Now, I’m not laying the blame at any/everyone else’s door for the lack of success – in fairness I’m the primary culprit. Where’s Good is a good concept (I think) but the design is frankly bad, and while it all works and works nicely (and fast) I suspect it just hasn’t got the right feel or interface.

In short, I need to do some work on it. (Wow, that’s becoming some kind of mantra for me at the moment) I need to have a think about how to make it work better and how to make it more appealing.

I think that I’m probably going to relaunch it in the first quarter of 2008, (i.e. between January and March) although I could wait ’til May, and do it on the anniversary of the initial launch and see what happens. In the meantime I need to figure out a lot of things about the site, including how to pimp the bloody thing out to the world. Well OK, probably initially to the UK, with potential for expansion.

In the process, I’ll be aiming (of course) to keep the sixty-odd reviews that *are* in the system – no point starting from absolute scratch again, after all, but most probably with a bundle of new ideas, a new design and the same old concept.

We’ll see.