Locally owned businesses can register with Buy Local Berkeley

As I transition out of the web directory business, I encourage businesses that have listed with me to register with Buy Local Berkeley. Buy Local Berkeley is:

“a collaborative of merchant associations and individual small business owners in Berkeley. We educate about the cultural, environmental, community and economic benefits of shopping at locally owned and operated businesses. Our goal is to inspire people to shift their spending to Berkeley businesses whenever possible.”

Find out complete information about qualifying for and registering with BuyLocalBerkeley at http://www.buylocalberkeley.com/node/18

ShopInBerkeley is closing

Greetings.

It is with a somewhat sad heart and somewhat relief that I announce that I am closing ShopInBerkeley.

When I first opened ShopInBerkeley.com in 2001, it was difficult and expensive for small businesses to get a presence on the web that they control. Now, eight years later, there are plenty of options out there for businesses, both directories and individual business web sites. So, rather than being just another web directory, I have decided it is time to gracefully bow out.

But rather than become a series of dead links (many web sites out there link to pages on ShopInBerkeley), pages are being silently redirected to other pages for each business. Over the next few months, I’ll be creating these redirect codes, until all 800+ of my pages are redirected. Pages will be forward to (in this order, depending on availability):

• BuyLocalBerkeley.com (a great directory of locally owned businesses in Berkeley)
• The business’s own web site
• Yelp (“real people, real reviews”) I’ve been adding reviews to Yelp for years, and you can read my reviews at leetramp.yelp.com. Remember to read online reviews with a grain of salt and critical thinking: there are folks out there who write overly negative reviews just because they can; look for the overall experiences of people, not the one or two negative reveiws (or glowing reviews).
• Google Local search results for that business.

It’s been a pleasure running ShopInBerkeley, and while I made a few coins on the business, I won’t be retiring anytime soon.

Thanks to all those of you out there who have passed along updates for businesses, encouraged busiensses to sign up, and otherwise been supportive of ShopInBerkeley.

If your interested in my other web exploits, you can visit my personal blog at trampleasure.net/lee.

Lee Trampleasure

Why spend time on the redirects?

I completed the code needed to redirect all my pages to other page (BLB, Yelp, the business’s web site). This took me quite a while, and many people have asked why I put that much time into it. Well, if I just removed the pages, many links would go dead. For example: www.richardschwartz.info/Eccentrics_buy.html has many links for Berkeley bookstores, and I found at least three were pages on ShopInBerkeley. So, if the author of this site does not get around to changing the links, they are still valid links since I’ve created all those redirects.

I just hate seeing “404” error codes.

– Lee