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Zip2 - New York Today

New York Today homepage. Click to view a large version.

Assignment: Create a rich, robust city guide utilizing all the Zip2 products—Yellow Pages, Maps, Directions, Entertainment Guide, Real Estate Guide, Community and Classified offerings—for the New York Times online division. Launched 1998.

Approach: The in-house Zip2 team worked closely with the NYTimes online media team to define the content offerings and refine the Zip2 City Guide suite to suit the needs of the New york Times. The project lasted several months and included working with another consulting team from io360 to develop the visual treatment for the site.

The underpinnings of the offering were based on personalized settings that a visitor would setup as they used the product—zip code for weather. If an address was input, it was the starting basis for any maps and directions. Interests were collected and customized the view of content delivered into the homepage calendar of events. The offerings revolved around the core business directory—restaurants, theaters, movie theaters, real estate etc. and was supplemented with the rich content base created by the New York Times. Restaurant pages were enriched with reviews and ratings from the Times and from thrid party reviewers. Movie pages included reviews from the Times and national sources and nearby items such as banks, parking, subways, restaurants were called out.

The architecture for the site was based on the Zip2 City Guide architecture with a handful of major categories: Entertainment, Real Estate, Community, Businesses, Maps and Directions. The Times added Marketplace, Life, Neighborhoods and Tools to round out their content.

Homepage: The homepage of NYToday was an editor published event calendar highlighting the happenings for the day. Rotation of content was based on personalized preferences by the user. The calendar was divided into Day and Evening events and would change based on the time of day. Today's weather was featured prominently and there were additional sidebar features.

In addition, at the bottom of the today's calendar, the user could page through the next five days of events.

One of the unique features of the site was the Planner. Accessed from a global naviation link in the header, the user could set up their custom planner—save events from the site to their planner—and then sync the whole thing to their Palm. NYToday was one of the first sites to feature this level of personalization.