Matt Shampine

As many of you know, we designed and built the wearenytech.com website (with CMS) in one night.  In my opinion, the single most important feature, which I also think is often overlooked is the filtering system.  While we definitely had a lot of ideas on how to possibly handle filtering, credit has to go to Eric for pushing for the “natural language” method that we ended up creating.

If you haven’t used the filtering system on wearenytech.com yet, I suggest that you go check it out.  The system starts out by showing everyone that we’ve profiled with the filter reading “show me anybody.”  You can then drill down with a profession, expertise, and even a borough of New York to filter to what you’d like to see. 

The future is going to be awesome, right?  Just imagine that by this time next year when we have pages with tiles of over 200 names, faces, and quotes showing all of the people who are presently kicking ass here in the New York tech community.  And then on top of that you can filter all of those people by profession, expertise, and borough.  Like I said, awesome.

I think it’s also worth noting how we handle the page URLs, titles, and meta tags for the filter pages.  As people continue to perform more complex and longer-tail searches through Google, we thought that it’d be a good idea to optimize everywhere possible.  For instance, perform a search with “show me females who can do anything” and you’ll find a meta description that reads, “Filter through the members of the NY Tech community by only showing females located in NY.”  We think that this is going to be pretty powerful stuff sooner or later.  Even now, if you do a search in google for say “show me designers who specialize in ux in soho,” our page shows up as the first three results.  As we continue to generate more profiles and filters, I’m hopeful that this will become a main resource for anyone looking for quality information relating to all the amazing people in the NY tech community.