The newest local search site has arrived, and this time its Canadian: ZipLocal

My standard practice of welcoming a new site is to usually point out about a dozen mistakes they have commited (usually over at Greg Sterling’s blog). But things change, and this time I have my own blog – huzzah!

Furthermore, in terms of disclosure, the investing company behind ZipLocal was interested in our iBegin product. I met them. But I’m reviewing these guys because – well, I review all local sites.

So, things that ZipLocal needs to fix up:

• The frontpage takes eons to load. The frontpage took 10.875 seconds to load. I can only assume its the gobs of JS they are loading, but simply unacceptable.
• Beta 1.0. Slight one, but seeing that just angers me beyond belief. These guys have existed as RedToronto for years. They have been working on this for a while. Sure there will be bugs. But what the hell do you need a beta 1.0 line for?
• I’m a big stickler for un-needed linkies. Why have something that turns off Display Tips? The actual display tips are actually very cool, and kudos to them. But when I look in the top right, I expect a login (or *hint* language selection). Having it there seems like a waste
• ‘Send Feedback’ vs ‘Contact us’ – what exactly is the difference? Why not just have the ‘Send Feedback’ form on the Contact us page?
• Need to clean up their categorization – Q – “Quilts Whol & Mfrs” doesn’t cut it. I have an entire list of popular abbreviations for categories if you want it [from 'acces' to 'whol']
• I hate the fact that on certain inner pages I have to go back to the frontpage to do a search. What the hell people – if I visited the Help page you can be damn sure I am interested in searching.
• We own two stat-tracking programs. Combined, they track 500,000 uniques per day. And guess what – 4-6% have Javascript off. So when I click on your feedback link and end up here, you can be sure I am unimpressed.
• The CSS has to be tweaked on the frontpage. When you actually fill out what and where, the text is aligned way to the top of the search box, with maybe 2 pixel padding on top, and 10 on the bottom
• Search results: that radius circle is quite cool. And having the TTC (Toronto) on the map also – very cool. Nice one on that.
• I think the choice of Google Adsense colors made me cry. Holy painful on the eyes batman
• The map hated me when I was using it. I pressed zoom in twice, the map image disappeared, it hung for roughly 10 seconds, and then WHOOSH came back. The map is *VERY* sluggish – it just chugs on my machine (and this puppy has 2 gigs of ram and enough horsepower)
• I hate it when I click on a listing I get this massive box that takes up the entire space above the map, when all it needs is a few hundred pixels. Talk about jarring experience. And what is with that + in the topright of that popup – how am I suppoused to magically fathom that it takes me to a page.
• I would like a list view. Mostly because the map is amazingly slow.
• It has built in directions. Pretty damn cool
• The site passed the apostrophe test – huzzah guys. Almost everyone out there chokes on the fearsome ‘
• The names are normalized – again, good job on that.
• Clicking on ‘Your Search History’ throws out the smallest scrollbar imaginable. I did notice that it did not overlap over the map. Come on – that sucks. And dont use a stop sign for the image – use an X image.
• If they don’t find any results, they spit that out without the option of extending the search radius. Why?
• The search couldn’t find Wal-Mart (even though it would suggest that name). This is with a 75 km radius from downtown Toronto – the right most part was Oshawa, and it even covered Hamilton and Niagara Falls. And no Wal-mart?

Just because of the Wal-mart debacle, I give it a D-

Whew – that turned out to be a long one. They should be paying me for this