Gemlik is a coastal district of Bursa, on a bay of the Sea of Marmara. Gemlik Rehberi ("Gemlik Guide") has been its local guide since 2003. It started as a business directory. Today it lists 990 businesses across 34 neighbourhoods, and it also has local news, a forum and a handful of small tools that residents use every day.
This post is about what 23 years of running a site for one town taught us: what people actually come for, and what we would build first if we started again.
People come for the boring questions
We assumed people would come for news and articles. They mostly come with short, practical questions:
- Which pharmacy is on duty tonight?
- Is there a power or water cut today?
- Is a zoning plan on public display for my neighbourhood, and how long do I have to object?
- How do I check my water bill or property tax?
- What's the weather, and what does fuel cost today?
None of these is a big feature. Each one is a reason to open the site today, and together they bring people back every day. So the homepage does not start with the latest articles. It starts with a short "today in Gemlik" summary:
| Item | Why it matters locally |
|---|---|
| Pharmacy on duty | It changes every night, and people look it up in a hurry |
| Zoning plan notices | The objection window is limited, so we show the days left |
| Planned outages | Power and water cuts affect shops and homes the same day |
| Death notices | In a small town, this is how people hear about funerals |
| Weather, fuel prices, prayer times | Small, daily and checked often |
Turn official notices into one sentence
Official notices are usually a PDF or a scanned page on an institution's website. Most residents never open them. We found that the most useful thing we could do was rewrite each notice as one line that answers "does this affect me?".
Instead of a link titled "Plan amendment announcement", the summary reads: Kurşunlu: plan change, 10 days left to object. The full notice is one click away on the announcements page, but most people only need the sentence.
Put numbers next to their source
The homepage shows a small housing ticker based on Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey (TCMB) data. For example, Bursa's average sale price was 42,675 TL per m² in the third quarter of 2026, up 23.8% year on year. Every figure carries its period, because a number without a date is easy to misread when prices rise this fast. For anyone who wants a figure for their own home, we link to a free home value estimator that uses the same data.
A directory is only useful if it is current
A wrong phone number is worse than no phone number: the user calls, it fails, and they stop trusting the whole site. So we treat missing and outdated data as tasks. The admin dashboard lists them, for example "75 businesses have no phone number", and they get fixed one by one. Business owners can also add or update their own listing.
Write guides that don't go stale
Fees, dates and phone numbers change every year. A guide full of them is out of date within months. Our newer guides explain where to go and whom to ask instead. For example, the bill and debt check guide brings together where to check water, property tax, traffic fines, vehicle tax, electricity and gas, and points to the official channels instead of copying their numbers.
What we'd tell anyone building a local site
- Start with the daily questions, not with content. The duty pharmacy brings more repeat visits than any article.
- Summarise official notices in plain words and link to the original.
- Show the date and source of every number.
- Treat missing data as a to-do list, not as something to hide.
- Prefer guides that explain the process over guides that list this year's fees.
The site is in Turkish: gemlikrehberi.com. If you run a local or city site anywhere, I'd like to hear which small feature brings people back to yours.
