Shipping the Neighborhood Model: From Shopping Centers to Real Places People Know

Had a solid session today working on the badboothsites project, specifically pushing forward the "neighborhood model" across multiple verticals. The big win? Finally ditching those generic "40 shopping centers/medical plazas" references for actual neighborhood names that people recognize.

The Neighborhood Model Breakthrough

I've been wrestling with how to make these local business sites feel more authentic, and today it clicked. Instead of listing random shopping plazas, I rewrote the medspas architecture to focus on real neighborhoods across 4 key counties: San Bernardino, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Orange.

The venue templates got a complete overhaul too. What used to be generic venue pages are now "Neighborhoods We Serve" hubs with proper schema markup - MedicalBusiness+HealthAndBeautyBusiness for medspas, RealEstateAgent for realtors. The slugs are way cleaner now: med-spa-near-* and homes-near-* instead of whatever mess I had before.

New Vertical: Nail Salons

Decided to tackle nail salons as the next vertical since the template was working so well. Built out the full 32-file scaffold with BeautySalon + LocalBusiness schema. The service breakdown is pretty comprehensive:

• Core services: Manicure, Pedicure, Nail Extensions, Nail Art, Dip Powder
• Job styles: Gel, Acrylic, Nail Art, Natural, Specialty, Bridal, Kids/Teen
• That's 7x3=21 sub-variations, which should cover most search intent

Went with Cormorant Garamond + DM Sans for the font pairing - feels right for the beauty niche.

Infrastructure Updates

Got all 7 golden app IDs filled in the deploy script, and added a --vertical flag that properly uploads theme files. Also did some housekeeping by renaming "blog" to "guides" across all 63 files in every vertical. Small change but makes the content strategy clearer.

Current Status

Here's where each vertical stands:

Fully deployed: gyms, barbershops, plumbers, hvac, roofers Ready to deploy: medspas, realtors (neighborhood model implemented) In progress: nail-salons (scaffolded but needs content cleanup)

The medspas and realtors updates are committed but not deployed yet. Need to push those venue template changes, then provision the nail-salons golden app and swap out the placeholder gym content with actual nail salon data.

Next Steps

Left myself clean handoff notes - the deploy commands are ready to run, just need to execute them:

./scripts/deploy.sh --vertical medspas --files "theme/template-venue.php theme/page-venues.php"
./scripts/deploy.sh --vertical realtors --files "theme/template-venue.php theme/page-venues.php"

Then it's provision time for the nail-salons golden app and content cleanup.

Feeling good about this neighborhood-focused approach. It's way more authentic than the generic shopping center stuff, and should perform better for local SEO. The template system is really starting to pay off - being able to scaffold a new vertical in one session feels like a superpower.