Let me be clear: I don't think Craigslist is going anywhere any time soon. Craig Newmark's ad-listing service operates in over 700 locales and generates roughly 20 billion page views every month, according to the company fact sheet. Obviously, Craig and his list are doing alright for themselves.
But in comparison to the rest of the web’s social heavyweights, Craigslist hasn’t aged all that well, both in terms of aesthetics and usability. Wired hit on the problem in an August 2009 article that compares the site to other popular job boards: “[A]nother wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a hig hly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors — Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo’s HotJobs — but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?”
I wouldn't go that far, but obviously what we think of as the "Internet" has changed a lot in the last 16 years since Craigslist was first launched. Even if a site looks straight out of 1995, it should incorporate the web values of 2011. Here are the five characteristics that the next ecommerce powerhouse should offer the modern web user.
1. It Should Be Personalized
All you need to create an account on many classified ad sites is a working email address. Often, there are no additional information requirements. The result? Many users are anonymous.
There are times when anonymity is beneficial, but looking through online classified ad sites...
