After four months of planning and hacking and testing, I’m proud to announce Revamp, a niche vertical aimed at the homebuilding, renovation and repair industry

After launching a self-contained social network about a year ago that was half community, half business directory, we learned that the product lacked consistent reader activity and was difficult for non-blogger business owners to use.

So I and a colleague regrouped and tried to distill the essence of what businesses might want from the Web. Our answer? Personal contact with potential customers. It’s why they join Facebook and do branding advertising and buy a listing on a newspaper social network.

The problem? These are plumbers and designers and landscapers, not writers. So we trimmed down the options to three categories: news, events and offers. We integrated an “Ask a Pro” feature as a way to put experience front-and-center to start the conversation with primed customers. And we always have a way for people to contact our pros to ask in person or schedule a bid.

We can also work with networks like Facebook, Twitter or existing products like a company Website or blog. We want to be the hub for our advertiser’s various work on the Web. We want to bend like the reed and help local businesses understand the social Web.

What it isn’t

Seems like a funny thing to explain, but it’s important:

• Revamp is not a business directory. Why reinvent the wheel? Get into the stream where people are looking for information.
• It also uses some newsroom content to provide relevant local information for people who search the network, but is not driven by editorial material.
• Revamp is also not the most important part of the network. Yes, we want people to find our network aggregator useful, but if we can teach local businesspeople to tag and categorize regular postings correctly in order to maximize their exposure to local search traffic and a local customer’s first stop is their profile, we’re successful.

Take a look and see if it meets your needs. I’ll be following up with the kind of feedback we get from the pros who join the network.