Where’s Good RIP

Over this weekend, I’ve finally pulled the plug on Where’s Good, the site I launched a while back with the idea of user-generated content for reviewing restaurants, pubs and places to go. It had been around since May 2006 and while the initial take-up and first-year business was OK, it had faded to nothing by the start of 2008.

If I’m honest, the idea stagnated a bit – there was still stuff I wanted to do on it, but I just never got round to doing the second phase, so it all just kind of stayed there, doing nothing much. It may come back when I’ve done a version two, but I don’t know.

When all’s said and done, it didn’t get the interest – again, some of that is down to the fact I didn’t do a lot to promote it. I still think the idea’s good, but there are other sites around that do a similar thing, so I need some kind of USP (Unique Selling Point) and really that’s something else it just didn’t have. Interestingly, at about the same time I bought the Where’s Good domain name, another one called Where Shall We Eat came up, and that one’s never taken off either – the holding page it now has is the same one it’s had since 2005.

Over the last three or four months the registration was also getting hit hard by spammers. Interestingly, the account set-up process I’d written meant that those spammers names/profiles never actually saw the light of day – the system blocked them, or forced the extra verification that they couldn’t supply – so that’s something I’ll probably take on and use elsewhere. (In truth I already have used it elsewhere, but it’s nice to see that it works when getting attacked upwards of 200 times a week)

I’ve a couple of other ideas that may use the same domain name, or I may let that curl up and die as well. I don’t know yet. In the meantime, I haven’t invested that much time in the work on the site (and yes, perhaps if I had invested more time it would’ve been more successful. I know.) so it’s not a massive loss, but it is a bit of a disappointment to pull the plug on something that could (and perhaps should) have been so much better.

Time will tell whether anything comes from that particular revenant’s remains, though.