Urbanista: An Urban Girl’s Rolodex

Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at 11:52am by David Askaripour in Start-Ups

Cate Edwards, 24 year-old daughter of former U.S. Senator John Edwards, has been busy profiling the hippest New York City spots to shop, dine, and have fun with her first online venture, Urbanista Online.

Urbanista is an “Urban Girl’s Rolodex” for 20-somethings living in Manhattan. The site focuses on showcasing spots where young urban gals can get cheap hair cuts, get deals on food, and how to have fun in the city without having to blow wads of cash. All that good stuff that girls jump in joy over.

At first glance, upon typing in the domain, you are brought to a fairly decent splash page. I was actually tricked into thinking that the splash page was the homepage of the site, as the tabs (UrHome, UrSelf, UrSay, and UrLife) seemed to be clickable, but were actually not.

Hmm… The site would have really been off to a great start if the splash page was in fact the homepage (nice and simple), but upon clicking I was led to an outdated blogspot (yuck!) blog with a right-side navigation of roughly 16 select menus.

The content is geared towards city girls looking to go shopping around Manhattan, which is an excellent niche. There is a lot of quality mini-articles reviewing spots to get flowers, shoes, moving supply, salons, and such city dweller items/spots.

Urbanista isn’t a bad concept and I think that it can work. But Cate’s execution of the service isn’t too impressive. It’s a plus that she went down the blog route, but instead of actually using the blog system to only house her reviews, the entire site should have been built on a nice, clean, and maintainable wordpress system.

But what about commenting? As far as I know, readers are not allowed to comment which is a big mistake! Com’on Cate, I think it’s safe to say that 20-somethings like to talk and gossip about shopping.

Using the splash page as the homepage and turning the tabs into a real navigation system would be an excellent start to the site’s resurrection. Behind the scenes would be a wordpress system that would allow her to neatly organize each “Rolodex” in the sidebar - forget about those drop-downs.

Also, with the wordpress system she would be able to easily add a proper navigation bar to visibly display her about, contact, how-tos, and founder’s pages. Currently, they are all hidden in those hideous select menus.

Urbanista can catch on with the proper driving force behind it, no doubt. However, in the current ghost-town state that it’s in, I don’t see it going anywhere. This is a typical case of a new entrepreneur being passionate about something then as the weeks go by, slowing becoming less and less passionate to a point where the project becomes immobile.

I hope that Cate can prove me wrong and pull Urbanista together.

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