I want to start a city portal website like toronto.com where people can browse hotels, events, restaurants, attractions, store list I have a good name for a specific city, but I don't even know where to start. Where would I get something like newest events and a whole list of restaurants, hotels (updated)? What is the best way to proceed with this business, and how much do you think it'll cost to run this project? Thanks.
Talk with your local tourism bureau, chamber of commerce, and other business associations. They should be able to help. Cost will depend how you will monetize the site. If your are going to run local ads, there will be costs associated with the marketing materials, whether its online, mailings, or just the gas to knock on business doors/
this would be IMPOSSIBLE to do for a city the size of T.O... however, I have a nice little (busy) portal for my town here > www.sackville.biz (ALL MANUAL HTML, no scripts, automation, nothing) YIKES!!! A LOT OF WORK! i really can't imagine trying to do something like that for T.O. - keeping in mind, i'm more MARKETING, than i am... technical. BEST OF LUCK!
Thank you all. ThePublisher, tourism bureau, chamber of commerce and other business associations usually partner up and provide materials for free or are there some fees involved for the contents?
Cost to run it would be minimal, just a basic web hosting and domain. Probably the hardest part will be designing the site and picking the right CMS for it. The chamber of commerce should be able to provide you with a mailing list for all businesses in your target area, send out a simple direct mail piece to all of them with some kind of benefit for helping promote the site (i.e. "mention our site on yours in exchange for free advertising in our business directory"). Then you just need to worry about the actual traffic generation. Which is probably alot of work and expensive, but it's doable.
What type of contents except directories should be included in that type of websites/portals ? Like : - Directories of restaurants, hotels and business etc - Events Calendar please suggest more
doing advertising for your own city isnt hard. Get on the bus and put flyers on the seats, get the train/tram etc and do the same. Go to taxi companies ask them to put them in their taxis for free advertising. Where i live (Manchester UK) we have student areas (for universities) where you could quite easily g and stick some bumper stickers on phone box windows or bus stops etc (not entirely legal but everyone else does it). If there is a student area these are good people to get. You can have an area dedicated to gigs concerts etc sign up with an affiliate ticket company (ticketmaster.co.uk as an english example - they may have a US site) and you can earn money through ticket sales
I'm running a restaurant guide for my university and while it doesn't cost anything to maintain it other than hosting (i do all the coding/design myself), be prepared to spend some money advertising. Also, I've spent over a 5-6 months coding the website, and that's just for a restaurant section. Obviously I didn't spend a full 40 hours a week on it, more like 5 or 6, but be ready to work!
Thank you everyone for their advice. I'm sure it's almost impossible (too many at least) to call in every single restaurants and hotels even in one city/state. That's why I'm thinking about trying to obtain the list in other ways (chamber of commerce, tourism board). However, wouldn't the restaurants or hotels ask you why you were putting up their information (maybe it's even outdated) without their permission?
Check out my site for ideas. It is an Indianapolis city guide. Register with gasbuddy.com and traffic.com to get there feeds for cheapest gas prices and traffic updates. I get my local news from feedzilla.com because you will not find free news for a commercial site. Reuters has a few national news feeds and videos you can get for your site. Accuweather.com you can use weather feeds on a commercial site. Also if you are good with rss feeds you can get weather from: www.nws.noaa.gov because it is owned by the government you can use it freely. do searchs on other local sites there for community calenders, restaurant guides and stuff and some of them may setup a feed for you to use. Also at careerbuilder.com, apartments.com, and sellstufflocal.com have cobranding programs where they will add your header and footer to pages that come from your site and pay you. That way you have job, apartment and classifieds on your site. Google maps API is a program you can put maps on your site too, similar to mapquest you can zoom in and switch to aerial photo. I have been working on my city guide for about a year now, well it has been built for a while i just always add to it, but I'm sure you can get a lot more ideas there. Hope this helps. www.indyonline.com -Indianapolis city guide
Another way you could get the list is to just hire somebody to do it. It's basic data entry work, they just lookup stuff in the phonebook, local newspapers, craigslist, etc. Pay somebody $200 and you should be able to get several thousand businesses in a single spreadsheet, which is easy to import into a database. There's people on DP that will do it for you even.