borderswap.com: a Craigslist for the Imperial Valley

orware · Cholo Nako Joined: 26 Jun 2007 Posts: 38 Votes: 1

Hi everyone! I'm a little new to the Calecia community (as you can see, soy un wey, lol) but I am not new to the Imperial Valley. Since about the age of 16 I've been conducting my own unofficial analysis of the state of web design in the Valley and I've seen the worst websites you could possibly imagine over the years.

Some notables are:

PagersDotCom.com
ImperialValley.net (don't get me wrong Robert Harrold, the owner of this site and AERC Computers in El Centro, is a real nice guy but it doesn't take away the fact that I cringe whenever I visit this site and view the total inconsideration for modern web design techniques)

City of Brawley Website

City of El Centro Website

Imperial County website

There are dozens more, but at least most of their owners have had the sense to not renew their hosting plans anymore and their sites have gone down.

Calecia.com is one of the exceptions.

When you've seen many different examples of bad web design and good web design, it's pretty to recognize a high-quality web site when you see it.

So what does any of this have to do with borderswap.com?

Well, back in early April I began thinking of a project that I could work on that I would actually want to use. I ran through a couple of ideas, wrote a few of them down, put a few others on the backburner and chose the best one I could think of: a Craigslist for the Imperial Valley.

I was introduced to Craigslist about two years ago while I was up at school in the Bay Area. One guy I worked with would always drop in to talk about the latest thing he had been able to get off some guy on the cheap by using Craigslist. One time he was able to get a broken monitor completely free. He had the same exact monitor at home with a broken LCD panel, but the one he got had an alright panel, but something else was broken. He just switched the parts out and had himself a nice working monitor.

For those who don't know, Craigslist is a website that was started back in 1995 in the Bay Area to allow people to sell their stuff and services in a wide variety of categories for free. The only thing they charge for are job listings. The cool part is that the listings are always local to your area so you never have to travel very far to pick up whatever it is somebody might be selling. For more info you can check out the Craigslist Factsheet.

One thing that people might hate or like about Craigslist is its very simplistic design. I decided that if I were to put something together for the Valley that I'd do my best to make it look awesome so that people with crappy sites might finally get P.O'ed and finally invest in something that looks decent.

I also wanted it to be fairly easy to use and as unrestricted as I could make it so that people could add photos, videos, and documents with ease.

I've done quite a bit of testing, and my friend's sister up at Berkeley helped me do a large portion of the Spanish translation for the site. There are still going to be kinks that need to work out, but I won't be able to find them all on my own.

So here's the situation: borderswap.com needs you!

In order to be successful, as many people as possible need to know about the site and begin using it on a regular basis. It's that simple (and that hard).

I'm hoping that the strong community here at Calecia.com will be able to help me out with that.

Just like Calecia.com, borderswap.com is a grassroots operation that wants provide something useful for the Imperial Valley. I firmly believe that just because we are from a more rural area it does not mean that we should be denied the opportunity to use websites that provide useful services.

My hope with borderswap.com is that it will create a new marketplace for people to sell or trade their stuff and also that it will create a new service business for those who want to do some freelance work and make some extra cash by charging those people who would rather have somebody else create the online listings for them.

There are a lot of cool ideas that can be integrated and a lot of additional categories that might be specific to the Imperial Valley that I could add (for example the other day I added a "tractors" category along with a video game / systems category)

I hope you enjoy the site,

-Omar

P.S. There is one thing that I have brought up with elchrist, but that I hope some people can provide feedback on. On Craigslist, there are the listings, and there is also a forum area. I thought it would be a good idea if Calecia.com added some new Forum Categories to be used by people using borderswap and then I could link to them from borderswap.com. Currently, I setup a Google Group that would be used by users to post questions or to discuss other topics, but I don't think it's the same as a real forum. If we partnered up like this, it would bring some healthy interchange between borderswap.com and Calecia.com so that Calecia.com can grow and become more popular (or at least get a little more ad revenue).

whitebread · Bulldogs' QB Joined: 16 May 2007 Posts: 88

your missing the casual encounters section, thats really what runs craigslist.

Laughing

orware · Cholo Nako Joined: 26 Jun 2007 Posts: 38 Votes: 1

You got me there!

I chose to exclude the personals section from Craigslist on purpose, because I didn't want people to react negatively to some of the categories within that section before the site has even got off the ground. Here is the list from Craigslist:

Personals
strictly platonic
women seeking women
women seeking men
men seeking women
men seeking men
misc romance
casual encounters
missed connections
rants and raves

The sections can easily be added, but I wanted to hear from others whether they wanted it in there or not.

I think it would be a good idea, especially since, from what I've heard, there seems to be somewhat of a dating problem here in the Valley? I'm not too keen on that one, but maybe some other people can post on that and give their thoughts on whether it would be a good idea to add to the site.

Share your thoughts (I'm a really good listener).

What people want I'll do my best to bring to the site.

-Omar

P.S. Can some CSS be added so that list items don't appear as spaced apart as they do below? I wanted to use a list above, but didn't because the large spacing would have made things too hard to read.

List item 1

List item 2

gee4mac · Posted: 05 Jul 2007 02:24 PM Post subject:

Nice site, I had been waiting for something like this. It's Perfect! Thanks.

orware · Cholo Nako Joined: 26 Jun 2007 Posts: 38 Votes: 1

I'm glad you like it!

I'm going to create a text file and upload it to the server in a little bit with some HTML code people can use to help me spread the word using their Myspaces or Facebooks if they want. Once I do that I'll provide a link to it on here so that people can access it.

It's going to start small, like anything, but it can become pretty popular fast if more people know about it. Who doesn't like free services?

Borderswap is a Do-It-Yourself free service, but there are always going to be those people that do not want to do the work or are just not computer literate enough to do it themselves. For this reason, I think borderswap will create a new service area for those people in the Valley who want to pay to have their listings created, just like myspace created a marketplace for people that charged to create myspaces for other people. So instead of the classifieds people making the money, teenagers or other people that like creating listings and are good at it can charge other people for the service of making the listing, taking the pictures, etc.

If you have any suggestions or other feedback I'm all ears,

-Omar

Saca_Ranas · Posted: 05 Jul 2007 08:50 PM Post subject:

i would really no T4M Section either lol J/K nice site im sure once you get the word around youll be getting alot of hits.

CG · Cholo Nako Joined: 26 Sep 2006 Posts: 7

And also very important is the erotic services section! Check under "services" on CL! Thank you

orware · Cholo Nako Joined: 26 Jun 2007 Posts: 38 Votes: 1

orware · Cholo Nako Joined: 26 Jun 2007 Posts: 38 Votes: 1

So those new categories are up on the site now. The only thing I still have to do would be to put in an "Are you over 18?" notice.

There can be two ways to do that, either immediately within the Terms of Service when somebody signs up for the site (meaning no teenagers can use the site, technically) or modify it so that the warning only appears when you try and view one of those categories.

Now that I remember it, that's the reason why I didn't want to add these categories because then I'd have to deal with this stuff.

Oh well, it shouldn't be too bad I think.

I feel the same way about more ideas and suggestions as I do about tortillas, keep 'em coming.

ronky · Cholo Nako Joined: 02 Aug 2005 Posts: 26

I know this guy, freakin omar!!!

You still gotta build me a computer!!