Having thought quite carefully about this, I think the following are worth considering:
? It is too boring at the moment and to find anything you have to pick from a list of hundreds of classes/services and there might not even be anything in the section. It needs to look more interesting and be easier to use.
You must be different to Nethuns. No point reinventing the wheel. With that in mind I would suggest:
? Section to post volunteer opportunities. Many MNers are quite bright and would like the opportunity to do something on maternity leave or that is just for them as a SAHP.
? Section to post details of local support organisations. There are many local charities/social enterprises that do great work but nobody knows about them.
? Allow people to add pictures to listings to brighten it up.
? Cross-reference to different sections. Nethuns is very much stuff for mums and stuff for children. Some activities would sit well in both but it is not possible to load it once in multiple sections. Having a tick box to add the listing to multiple sections automatically be great and allow better searching (and an improvement on nethuns).
? Better search facility. Being able to search by date, location and type of activity would be good as would bring able to see results on a map or a list. Also being able to search by age of child, price and rating would be good, as would bring able to load abd search for pregnancy, new baby, toddler, preschooler, half-term etc etc. As would knowing how well dads rated or how well mums rated maybe. On Nethuns you have to go into each section to find stuff and it's really bitty. There's just too many sections really.
? weekend/half term/summer holiday specials/round ups. You could use local bloggers or write yourself using freelancers. You could mail these out and charge for advertising and promotional listings.
? Something for dads. Nethuns don't really cater for dads.
? Section to post meet ups. Lots of people organise meet ups so MN doesn't need to start doing this necessarily but just provide a space to share those meet ups so people can see what's on offer.
? A way to rate a local listing/service. Out of 5 stars say.
? Section for local MNers to post business details for free (Nethuns do this) but perhaps in addition to the usual childminders, cleaners and handy men make the most of the demographic and try to attract lawyers, accountants, architects and other professionals.
? More local competitions to encourage people to post events and updates.
? Better homepage for local (you can put your ads here to make some money!) with news, stories and a selections of top what's on listings. On Nethuns these listings are paid for. It would be nice if promoted listings made it on merit on MN. This would allow some of the free/low cost or charity options to get a look in.
? Redefine what an "event" is. At the moment people post course, classes and meet ups in "events" because they know it'll feature on the box on the Talk board. Realistically courses should disappear as soon as they cannot be joined any more. Sections for meet ups, support groups, classes and courses, fairs and fetes, baby/toddler groups etc would be better when coupled with better search facility.
? Instead of a link to events on the Talk board how about most recent activity? Then it moves a bit quicker and might encourage people to click into local more often.
? Make the local Tsarina job a proper, paid job with responsibilities for generating ad revenue and writing copy (or split it between ads and copy). You could do this using freelancers or employees but obviously the latter would take more admin and cost more in management time. S/he could also manage the local page to remove duplicate listings, listings with end dates months ahead and edit and move incorrect listings.
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I'll do Richmond just for the chance to use the red button 