May 6, 2009

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):

• 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 reviews (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 businesses to sign up, and otherwise been supportive of ShopInBerkeley.

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

Lee Trampleasure