NOVEMBER 2006 » FEATURE

Services Online

Restore Media, LLC, is launching TRADWEB, an online resource that lists service providers, from local steeplejacks to national architects.

In 1988, Period Homes' older sibling Traditional Building magazine was launched as primarily a product guide for professionals in the fields of restoration, renovation and traditional new construction. Seven years later, it was followed by an online counterpart – www.traditional-building.com – and together, both remain valuable resources for custom building, historic restoration and preservation products. The field of traditional-building services, however, has not had this type of coherent local, regional and national guide – until now.

TRADWEB is the next step in Traditional Building’s development as an online resource. The website pulls all of the specialized professional and custom services in the historic-building field together in an online database, and is edited by the craftspeople, artisans, custom fabricators, installers, designers, contractors and consultants themselves.

Site visitors can browse services in 28 general, or more than 1,000 specific, categories, to quickly sift thousands of company profiles. Popular categories are broken down into specific services – 21 under Architects alone – and are listed side by side with highly specialized services such as bell hangers. Compiling a comprehensive category list required experience on both sides of the market, and some trial and error. "I have been cataloguing the industry since the Old House Journal Restoration Directory launched in 1976," says Clem Labine, founder and editor-at-large of Traditional Building and Period Homes magazines. "On TRADWEB, I worked with John Corbett of Restoration Trades Catalog. John is a former tradesman himself – a steeplejack. Together, we assembled the category list and in order to test it, we selected companies at random from our present database and made sure we could accommodate them all.

"Specialty service providers can list in five service categories for free. An e-mail containing the listing’s browser statistics will be sent every six months, along with a copy of the listing to be checked for accuracy.

The company name, contact details, website address and basic information are displayed in a free listing. Optional Priority Listings, upgrades and Project Portfolios allow greater exposure through additional categories and expanded, illustrated profiles.

A company with a Priority Listing will appear in an additional 10 categories, a total of 15, and will be highlighted at the top of any search in which it appears. Its online profile can be up to 350 words, with a photograph and a hotlink to a website. Priority listed companies can purchase an unlimited number of additional categories, and receive monthly, rather than biannual, e-mails about their listing’s content and browser traffic.

Whether free or Priority, listed companies may add, edit, delete, update and upgrade listings at any time, ensuring that TRADWEB remains a live, interactive service for the wider historic-building-services community.

As a search tool, TRADWEB lets professionals and their potential clients bypass random internet search results. It allows browsers to search locally or nationally in the U.S. or Canada, putting local artisans on an equal footing with larger companies.

"This new website allows us to drill down further into the market," says Labine. "Previously, we have restricted ourselves to the providers of products, because there are fewer of them and they change less rapidly than service providers. It has been impossible for us to serve the 50,000 service providers out there, until now. The new web-based technology that we have incorporated into TRADWEB pulls together the whole field of service providers."

To register, logon to www.tradwebdirectory.com or call the TRADWEB staff at 718-636-0788 x39.  

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