Extreme Makeover

(cue violins) Zenbu.co.nz used to be a fairly drab, but highly functional website. It had a funky logo but did little more than put data on the page. 

(cue rock guitars) But now, let me present to you the new look Zenbu! (wild applause, audience covers their open mouths in shock) Still with all the data and functionality you love (in fact even more!) but in a tidy package that’s easy on the eye too.

Also baked into the new look are Snap Preview images on all outbound links and the ability to bookmark your favourite entries for even easier later reference. Choice!

Man vs Machine or… Man is Machine

Time to Eat Out

Eat Out www.eatout.co.nz have contributed their entire database of 200 restaurants from all around the country to Zenbu fleshing out this section of the data. ‘Restaurants’ is the most often searched category in the yellow pages, several times more frequently searched than #2 (Doctors).

It was refreshing to deal with people who just ‘get it’. Out of frustration with the yellow pages (I concur!) they started their website aiming to become THE resource for restaurants by adding extensive details of the menu and photographs of the dishes. It is a really nice site with concentrated information on a targeted niche. Zenbu will never have such depth of information on those restaurants – Zenbu aims to be THE site to find the basic information on everything, then we can point you to 3rd party sites with more info.

Eat Out could see that it is better for both Zenbu and Eat Out, as well as the restaurants themselves, for that basic contact information to be available to consumers in as many places as possible. There was nothing to be gained by not releasing that data, and everybody is better off.

This is our first successful (albeit small) data syndication project with a 3rd party. I trust I can find more people who just ‘get it’ and keep growing the pool of free Zenbu information.