Enfield Online: Undermining local credentials

Local credibility is undermined by outsourcing e-mail and community services.

The Site

Enfield Online is a directory of local information for the Enfield district of north London. Its coverage ranges from news, education and restaurants to ‘what’s on’, landmarks, travel and online message forums.

Among the enticements the self-styled “Portal for Enfield, Middlesex, UK” offers Enfielders is a “FREE email account!” sign up from the home page. The directory service is free and anyone can post community notices or new topics to the message forums without needing to complete the ‘register’ option presented on most pages.

Revenue is generated by the rotation of banner ads on the’inside’ pages and the menu bar links to national retailers.

The Takeaway

For all its searchable databases of restaurants and schools and its community issue polls, Enfield Online undermines its local credibility by outsourcing of its e-mail and community services to a California-based company, Everyone.com.

So, for example, the e-mail sign up and site registration forms ask for household income in dollars, while dates are asked for in the US configuration of month/day/year rather than the English day/month/year. This is repeated in the dating of entries in the message forums and compounded by the frequent banner ads quoting dollar prices or, in one case, a mortgage service clearly for Americans only.

It is tempting for a small outfit to outsource applications such as e-mail – the banner ads suggest that Everyone.com offers a free or low-cost service. But however familiar the British are with US culture, little things like date formats really do jar. More generally, it seems strange to impose a clearly North American service on an avowedly local UK site. There are plenty of UK companies offering free e-mail accounts: why not use one of those?

First published on 17 June, 2003