Project Nande — Vol. 3
Projec Nande is a membership club started by a group of Chicago based travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers. Our mission is to help members discover every corner of Chicago, cross neighborhood lines, and make the most out of their Chicago experience. Here are links to Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
In the last post, I outlined our grand plans to redesign the site and new ways to produce content. In the past two months we finally finished what we set out to accomplish and are really happy with the results.
The only question now is whether our readers and the people we built this for are happy with Project Nande. I suppose time will tell, but for this post, I wanted to walk you through what’s new with Project Nande.
Membership Community
When we started Project Nande, the intention was to experiment with ways to make this a sustainable business. One thing we wanted to avoid was resorting to filling the site with ads, pop-ups, and anything that would distract you from getting to the content you’re trying to read.
I personally have a huge distaste for pop-ups and those sort of things anyway, but what’s worse is that it makes getting “clicks” the end-all and be-all for ad-supported content producers. The incentive then is not to produce great content, but rather to to churn out as much stuff as you can, add a click-bait title, and shove as many ads as you can into any available space on the screen.
At the end of the day, we don’t think you need to read another article about the top 50 hamburgers in Chicago, and we certainly don’t want to devolve into doing anything like that to keep the lights on.
Instead, we’re positioning Project Nande as an online membership club and implementing a paid subscription model where in return for a monthly membership fee, members get a new guide delivered to them every week. This will allow us to ensure that our core focus is on producing high quality original content through our city guides and provide even more personalized service to our members.
Exploration Concierge Services
Speaking of a more personalized service, in addition to the content we produce, we now offer members direct access to the Nande team in the form of a text message based concierge that will do anything to help them explore Chicago.
We provide members with a number that you can text which puts them in direct contact with us. Anything we can do to get members out and about in Chicago, we’ll help them do. A few examples could be helping plan a date or family outing, answering questions about our guides, booking hotels or flights, or putting together a personalized mini-city guide. As long as it’s not illegal and within the bounds of helping you explore Chicago, we’re of service.
The Redesign — Before
The focus of our redesign was to build the the site in a way that makes it easier to browse through guides, and allow members to find what they need faster.
Below is a screenshot of our old design. A very simple design that had all of our guides posted on the right hand side of the screen. There wasn’t much in the way of organization. All of the guides were simply listed starting with the most recent on top.
Moreover, the membership functionality wasn’t there and neither was the text message based concierge service.
The Redesign — After
This is what you see when you go to our homepage. The background image is actually a picture I took that’s featured in one of our guides.
The guides themselves are all now organized as a part of a particular travel series. Each travel series has a particular premise that each guide in that series follows.
Through this approach, it allows us to have a clearer point of view in developing each guide, and we think it gives our readers an easier way to navigate and consume our content.
What’s Next
We just launched the new site a few days ago, and our work going forward will be to continue to produce original content, and build the community. That means more experiments to come with different travel series ideas, and offline events to get us exploring.
