Brownbook.net Gets a Facelift for 2024

Dear Brownbook Community,

We’re thrilled to announce a revamped look and feel for Brownbook.net! After months of dedicated work, we’re excited to introduce a facelift that focuses on enhancing usability, aesthetics, and a more familiar local search experience.

What’s New?

  • Revamped Home Page: Our new home page layout is designed for familiarity, simplicity and efficiency. We’ve changed from a single search box to two search boxes—one for business type or name, and the other for location—so you can now locate your business faster and more accurately than ever.
  • Enhanced Search Results Page: The search results page has undergone a complete transformation for a more user-friendly experience. Results are better delineated, and we’ve better summarised the business summary information you see before clicking the the Business Details Page.
  • Redesigned Business Details Page: Dive into the details with our revamped business details page layout. It’s more intuitive, providing you with the information you need at a glance.
  • Country Filter: We’ve introduced a new country filter in the header bar to streamline your search and ensure you get localized results. It remembers your last country of course, so no need to reselect each time.
  • Simplified Business Editing: We’ve simplified the rules around who can edit a business. Now, only the claimant has the power to make changes, protecting your listing and ensuring accuracy and reliability.
  • Mobile: And of course everything is designed for mobile first, so you get a better experience on mobile.

Why the Change?

Brownbook.net was founded in 2008 with the mission of empowering business owners to take control of their business listings online. Over the years, we’ve evolved with the changing landscape of local search. In our last major redesign, we embraced a database approach, but today, we transition again, to a more familiar local search feel.

With more than 40 million businesses listed globally, we recognize the importance of consistent listings across all local search websites for good rankings on Google. And while many consumers still begin their searches on Google, business owners understand that accurate listings on all directory and local search sites in key to getting ranked highly in local search on the big search engines.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

Over the past 15 years, we’ve grown to become a platform with over 2 million registered users and nearly 50,000 new businesses added every month. Our community includes business owners managing their listings in ones-and-twos through the UI, small SEO agencies working on behalf of multiple clients to manage a few tens or hundreds or businesses (some through the UI, and some through our automation APIs), and the world’s top SEO agencies utilizing our automation APIs to manage millions of businesses on behalf of their many tens of thousands of clients

As we roll out these changes, we’re enthusiastic about the next 15 years of remaining one of the leading local search and SEO platforms on the internet. And, best of all, our basic listing product is completely FREE to business owners, and we intend to keep it that way.

Thank you for being part of the Brownbook community—we look forward to providing you with a more intuitive and efficient business listing, SEO, and local search optimisation experience.

Explore the new Brownbook.net today and let us know what you think!

Best regards, The Brownbook Team

Blinx – business links

Brownbook launches a new ‘business links’ product in response to customer demand for a mobile optimised page they have full control of.

All the details are here: www.blinx.biz. Blinx costs $5 / month.

When a business owner adds a business, they are given a FREE Blinx page so they can try the product. Existing Brownbook users can go to their ‘My Businesses’ page and click ‘Manage’ or ‘Subscribe’ to configure their Blinx page.

Blinx includes a shortened url and a QR code that the business can use anywhere to promote their business to customers. The widgets on the page can be re-ordered to suit the business and any number of widgets can be added:

The simple admin screen enables widgets to be added, customised and moved re-ordered:

The customer gets to see a simple page promoting the widgets the business would like to be known for:

Typical use cases from Brownbook customers include:

“I don’t want to have to maintain a website, I put all my work on Instagram and have a great relationship with my customers on Instagram. All I need is a place to put my phone number, a link to my Instagram page and a link to my Google reviews, thats it”

“I continue to pay many thousand of dollars to a ‘tradesman review’ website every month just so I can continue to use their QR code and url on my vans… I dont need their lead generation anymore as I have so many vans and so much referral business, I just need an easy way to give potential customers my details and have them save my details to their phone, thats it”

Blinx is the perfect solution to these use cases.

The challenge of testing multiple domains…

Brownbook has always been accessible on .net .com .biz .info .mobi and .org… with all resolving to brownbook.net, but it’s always challenging to test them without the browser trying to help you type or various layer of caching at the browser level, cloudflare and server level… so this is a page mainly for internal use that we can open in an incognito browser and test all variants of each domain:

More

API development kit now live (SDK)

Our world class engineering team has gone the “whole hog” to help you easily utilise the Brownbook api.

We have launched and documented an SDK to help you use the Brownbook api to submit your listings to Brownbook (so minimal coding to be able to use the api). The normal Swagger piece is still there, but we have now packaged the code so you can use it really easily. There are now official Brownbook libraries in; java, python, typescript, go, php and javascript…

Send requests from your applications, via the Brownbook API, get API token etc, its all explained here: https://docs.brownbook.net/

The Brownbook API is built on HTTP, its RESTful and it:
– Uses predictable, resource-oriented URLs
– Uses built-in HTTP capabilities for passing parameters and authentication
– Responds with standard HTTP response codes to indicate errors
– Returns JSON_

Full details on how to sign up to use the api are here: https://brownbookblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/publisher-api/

Service area now live on the mapping

We have been asked many times to enable a ‘service area’ on the business details page.

Its now live, take a look at these examples:

https://www.brownbook.net/business/48995038/voyd-bed-bug-treatment
https://www.brownbook.net/business/47423592/assassinator-pest-management
https://www.brownbook.net/business/46463764/jims-cleaning-prahran

The ‘service area’ is useful for businesses to show the area in which they operate. The way to do this is to simply make the address such that Google can determine an area rather than an address point.

Please do remember to also use the ‘location tags’ to describe the area as well, as quite often these are not the same as a known Google mappable area and can include colloquial names for an area.

Thats better… thank you!

Thank you for all your help. We owe you a big big thank you for supporting Brownbook.net.

One of the pains of moving the whole of Brownbook to new systems last week was that we had some teething troubles… 40 million listings, millions of registered users…. We always new it was going to be challenging which is why we kept putting it off over the last few years. Its only when you consider the processing of hundreds of listings a second and do the maths you realise that its days of processing (even with the fastest of infrastructure and multi / hyperthreading…) to transfer Brownbook to a new modern infrastructure and code base.

So we fixed the password reset issues, the listing issues, the email confirmation issues and we are very nearly there. We have just a few small bugs to solve and the ‘search’ needs to finish indexing, then we can get on to the more exciting functions that you have been asking for.

Time for an update…

We started Brownbook.net in May 2008 and since then we have been working on the same PHP code, on a home-grown framework, using Sphinx search on AWS, with great success.

Now its time for a change… we are deep in to development of Brownbook version 2, which we are hoping to have live within the next 8 weeks. This will give us all an improved experience as it uses Laravel Vapor serverless deployment,  React Material design and some of the new AWS services. The improvements we will see include:

  • a maintainable code base so we can quickly release improvements
  • much improved SEO
  • faster more accurate searching
  • faster more reliable api usage
  • new interface that is quick and intuitive

For our API customers, we will be using the same api calls so there will be no need for you to make any changes.

For our users, we will use the same username and login service so you will not have to re-register.

We are looking forward to sharing more information very shortly.

Brownbook and Web.com team up for a great offer to businesses!

I’m thrilled to announce that Brownbook and Web.com have teamed up to offer all small business a free Digital Health Check, and a £50 voucher to spend on any Web.com services.

For every business listing on Brownbook, the team at Web.com is offering a FREE Digital Health Check PLUS a £50 voucher to spend on Web.com services. Web.com offers website Health Checks that identify any key issues that could be affecting the ranking or performance of your website across the web (not only on Brownbook.net) and provide vital information about the optimisation of your website. The team offers a friendly, no obligation consultation to determine any improvements that can be made to help to make your website work harder for you!

“We’re delighted to be partnering with Brownbook to offer free Digital Health checks to their local business customers,” says Alastair Thornton, UK Country Manager of Web.com. “We are finding more and more local businesses needing help with the complex world of local online marketing, and by working with Brownbook we are able to provide a quick and easy solution, plus discounts on key services for those businesses who take up the offer.”

Brownbook and Web.com will start rolling out the service in August and September 2016, with the free consultations for a select group of Brownbook business customers, before a widespread general roll-out later in the year.  Don’t miss this great opportunity to make your website work harder for you!!!