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Habla Personalization? Si’! Yupi.com uses customized Web pages to get users involved in its Spanish-language site

WHEN YOU GET RIGHT down to it, Yupi Internet Inc.’s basic goal is a simple one: to get more of the world involved in the World Wide Web.

Carlos Cardona, chief technology officer of Yupi, created Yupi.com in 1996 so he could share his passion for the Internet with his father, who spoke Spanish and wasn’t very tech-savvy. Building on that initial idea, the site is now using interactive features like customized Web pages and personalized portals to open up the possibilities of the Internet to a more multicultural audience.

“Our mission is to offer something attractive to everyone. We want to make the Internet easy for people who speak Spanish and [offer] a tool that people who are not familiar with technology can use and have fun with,” says Gustavo Morles, senior vice president of content and business development. “We believe that the Internet is not about demographics – it’s about one-on-one marketing.”

The Miami Beach, FL-based network of Spanish-language Web sites, online portals and communities draws almost 300 million page views from about 13 million visitors monthly. Users – called Yupinautas – have access to a broad range of services including e-mail, chats, forums, classified ads and search engines.

They can also visit different Spanish-language online properties including CiudadFutura.com, an online community in Spanish supported by over 300 Web masters worldwide; MujerFutura.com, a specialized site for Spanish-speaking women; or Amarillas.com, a bilingual business-to-business community for the Americas and Spain.

To make the online community attractive to everyone while strengthening customer loyalty and motivating reoccurring visits, Yupi.com began offering personal home pages using an in-house home page application in March 1999. “But our original tool was limited and one-dimensional,” says Morles.

With limited template options and modification and editing capabilities making the process cumbersome, it was not the easy-to-use Web-building experience they had hoped for. So in July 2000, Yupi.com began offering home page applications from HomePage.com, a service provider that hosted, delivered and managed customer-facing platforms. (HomePage.com has since undergone a name change to Frontera Corp. and is no longer focusing on home page solutions.)

Yupinautas were offered 10MB of free Web space and a Web address under the MiCasaYupi.com domain. “The tool that HomePage provides has three dimensions. Novices can access it one way, while those with intermediate knowledge have other tools, as do advanced users. The use of the HomePage’s easy drag-and-drop tool has allowed a higher rate of growth in home pages,” says Morles, adding that there are over 100,000 existing Web pages, increasing by 300 to 400 new Web pages daily. Users can search the pages by theme or keyword.

To complement the personal home pages, Yupi.com is launching a profiling tool where each Web master will be profiled, and that database will be searchable. “It’s all about belonging and being part – not a home page standing alone in cyberspace,” says Morles.

Almost 400,000 members belong to the Yupi.com community. “We are very active in collecting information from our registered users,” says Morles, who stresses a strict privacy policy in which they do not share user information with third parties. “We don’t collect for the sake of collecting. We want to understand who our registered users are, what they what and how we can service them better.”

That information and Yupi’s customization abilities allow for a better handle on the demographics of their users and a better profile for their advertisers to target specific age groups or interests of users of Yupi products.

“The sites are linked together and cross-promoted,” says Morles. “To us, the important thing is each one fills a different niche. We have horizontal, vertical, broadband, business, men, young adults, women and shopping per country.”

In addition to the Web pages, Yupi.com allows users to customize the appearance and content of their own portal. The MiYupi personalization tool allows them to custom build a browser interface, reflecting their particular areas of interest. Users can track stock portfolios and view customized content, like daily news and weather reports.

To personalize the total Internet experience, Yupinautas have access to the Mi Amigo Yupi Tool Bar, which can be downloaded by users and then accompany them around the Web, allowing them to access Yupi.com channels and services from any location. Searches within the Yupi database can be conducted directly from the toolbar, which Yupinautas can personalize for services such as chats, Yupi mail and country-specific news.

Also offered, in conjunction with e-lingo, an Internet-based language translation provider, is a translation service allowing Yupinautas to conduct searches and receive results in their preferred language. The translation services offer the ability to choose from six languages and translate 18 different language combinations.