New on eVenues: Venue Guides by City

Over the past four years we've compiled the largest database of meeting rooms and event spaces on the web. We started in Seattle, then quickly expanded to markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, New York and Washington DC.

We quickly realized that although we had a lot of venues, many first time visitors to our site found all the choices a little overwhelming. This is why we added a filter sidebar to each of our listings pages so that users could narrow down their search by the three criteria that mattered the most: capacity, price, and neighborhood. This definitely helped our users find exactly what they needed without spending an inordinate amount of time sorting through the various options.

As we continued to talk with and get feedback from our users, however, we realized that what they really wanted was a real human being to help them find the very best venue for a particular event. This is why we created the "Full Serve" option whereby our users, often first time event planners, would provide us with specific information about their event and we would get back to them with the best possible options.

While all these innovations have helped improve the user experience, we continued to look for other ways to help event planners find the perfect space.

After watching user behavior through our analytics data, it became clear to us that not everyone who visted our site was looking to book a venue right away. Rather, they were "window shopping" for an event that they may do some time down the line.

For these window shoppers, we have started to create venue guides for each city. These guides recommend the best venues for every conceivable type of event, from small meetings to large gala events. Furthermore, we single out the best spaces in the most important locations. In our Seattle venue guide, for example, we provide a list of our favorite venues near SEA-TAC airport, as well as venues near the Washington State Convention Center. In our San Francisco guide, we list the best venues in the Financial District as well as venues in Downtown San Francisco. In our LA venue guide, we list venues near LAX as well as venues in Hollywood.

So far we’ve only listed three of our most popular cities: Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We will, of course, put together more venue guides in the near future.

We hope you enjoy the venue guides, and that you will find them useful! If you have any suggestions about them, please let us know in the comments or email us at team@evenues.com.