As you know, we’ve been posting pictures of offices for over 2 years now, and that of course will not ever change. We do want to introduce you to some site enhancements that you are sure to notice popping up around here.

1. Company/Job Information – Powered by Glassdoor.com

The biggest enhancement to Office Snapshots will be our partnership with Glassdoor.com to provide company and job specific links to each office post. The basic idea is that if we do a post about Google, you will be seeing links that will provide you with information about what its like to work there or what salaries are like for employees at Google.

If Glassdoor doesn’t have any company-specific information, there will be a link to jobs related to that company’s industry. So a webdesign company would have a link to webdesign jobs.

Overall, we’re happy because it adds additional information for you, while not detracting from our main purpose of showing you the interiors of workplaces around the world.

These postings will be located at the bottom of each post.

2. Product Listings

We’ve also begun placing product listings at the end of some posts to connect you with the great products in our featured offices. The main companies we will be listing are Steelcase, Herman Miller, Blu Dot, HON, and IKEA.

There are a bunch of other companies, but I just don’t always have the time or knowledge to research them all so I can know the exact model of chair is in each post just by seeing it.

That being said, I’ve been trying to collect the information from our submitters whenever possible.

3. More Indexes

It took us a while to have a company index and location index, but those have exploded in popularity lately. The company index has actually our most viewed page over the last several months.

We are currently working on a designer index that will list the architecture firms and design companies that design many of our featured offices.

We will also be featuring more coworking offices and will have a separate index to list those spaces as they don’t really fit inside of the regular company index.

Over the last several months, I’ve slowly been categorizing each post with location data so that eventually we would be able to have an index with every office location. Well, that day is here and I would like to introduce you to our new Location Index.

The location system uses Wordpress’ built-in category hierarchy, which would make the task seem easy, but in fact it was extremely tedious and boring. You see, previously, we had been tagging every post with the location data, but being the dunce of web design that I am, I had no good idea of how to display that information. So after introducing the Company Index, I just decided to use categories to simplify the whole thing. The only issue is that Wordpress does not allow a tag and category to use the same slug, so I had to slowly, one-by-one, go through and create the categories, attach them to posts, delete tags, then rename the category slug to the short form you now see.

Anyways, I realize that the data on both the Company index and Location index is not the most beautiful looking, but it’s there, and it’s useful. My goal is to keep adding features to Office Snapshots that adds value to the readers. A refreshed site design is probably overdue, but at this point, I’d rather have a useful site with a ton of offices than a pretty website that has some content but is ultimately not very useful.

The next thing I’ll be working on is some way to browse by office ratings. Any other ideas that would make the site more useful to you?

Enjoy!

If you have been wondering why posts have been very infrequent lately, it’s because I forgot how important internet is for running a website. Actually, I just moved to a new house and just had the internet (Verizon FiOS) hooked up yesterday. Happy New Year too, looking forward to a great year of posts.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that we’ve shown the interiors of just about 250 different companies. I remember when I first began the site that 9 of 10 emails returned to me were “no, we’re not interested”. Now, we frequently have company CEO’s and owners emailing us.

Hope you are all enjoying the site and that it is of value in some way. I’m looking into a new site design, as the list of companies on the left is becoming very large, also looking into categorizing companies by business type, and creating a way to browse more easily…including by location.

Have a good day…post coming in 15 minutes too.

-stephen

So, we’ve been posting offices for a little over a year and I just got curious about what everyone’s favorite office is so far. I don’t know how well this will work, but I was hoping a few of you would be kind enough to name your favorite space (or maybe a couple) as well as what you like about it in the comments.

Thanks!

Update: Just wanted to let you all know the additions made to my schedule of visits this time around.

Hey everyone, Just wanted to let you know that I’m headed to San Francisco this week and wanted to get some feedback as far as companies I should try to visit. I would also be interested to know if any of our readers work at tech companies in the San Francisco area that would allow Office Snapshots to drop by.

I do, however, have a few companies already lined up to visit:

Rofo is a free website for entrepreneurs and small businesses searching for commercial real estate and related services for facilities/office space.

Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to post their latest updates which are limited to 140 characters in length.

3Jam is a multi-person sms startup which allows users to text message multiple contacts at once. The product allows all message recipients to see who got the message as well as to “reply to all”.

Seesmic provides anyone with an innovative way to communicate and connect online through video conversation by recording a video directly on Seesmic’s website, with your mobile phone or by uploading an existing video straight from your computer.

Meebo is a communications and media company that’s re-writing the way people have conversations and communicate on the Web. They provide instant messaging and group chat to over 35 million people at meebo.com and via partner sites across the Web.