As CitySquares.com grows we need to make sure that the site continues to be easy to navigate and that all the people who use the site can find everything they’re looking for. One of the big additions to the site is a greatly improved navigation system that makes getting from one place to another much easier. We redesigned the header area at the top of the site so it would take up less space which in turn moves important content higher up the page. Now you can just change your location by typing in the city, town or zip code directly into the ‘change location’ text box as shown in the sample below.

Speaking of improvements, we created a cleaner and simpler home page that better articulates to our neighbors and merchant audiences just what CitySquares.com is about, and what you can do. On the new home page we added a really cool ‘What’s New’ scrolling ticker so users can see, in real time, what is happening on the site. The ticker shows the latest reviews, ratings, merchant profile edits and other activities on the site. We also added a more obvious call-to-action so small businesses can quickly jump into updating or upgrading their profile. There is also a list of top cities and a prominent location text field so users may jump to the location of their choice with ease. Visit the new home page here.

We think we’ve done a great job at providing valuable business content to users but we wanted to add more fun and engaging stuff too, so users could share their favorite businesses with friends and family as well. After figuring out what we wanted, and coincidentally meeting the folks over at AgendiZe, we entered into a partnership with them to bring you just the goods we envisioned! Agendize offers a plethora of viral tools for users such as sending a text message, add to Facebook and other bookmarks as well as instant messaging, saving to Outlook and so much more. You can see a sample of it here on this profile. Just click on on the of yellow buttons below the profile information and you will get a window of options. Every single profile on CitySquares.com has these tools so please start sharing your favorite businesses.

Lastly we added national events to the site which is just one of the early steps to truly become what we’ve long envisitione – to be your neighborhood online. The events are brought to you through our partnership with another great company called Eventful. You can find local, and hyperlocal, events all across the country on all the city, town, and neighborhood pages on CitySquares.com. Go here to see hyperlocal events in Wrigleyville Chicago!

Well, that’s quite a bit since our national roll out! And that’s not it either. Very soon we’ll be rolling out even more – including hyperlocal news, community information, classifieds, and some really fun tools to allow users to find everything they need about their location on CitySquares but more specifically, in their real world, their community.

Stay tuned for more updates and improvements to the site! We’re on a mission to provide the most hyperlocal content on the web – from business info, to real community info, events, news, classifieds, you name it. We aim to be Your Neighborhood, Online! Now the fun really starts.

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave some comments here! We’re always happy to chat and hear your thoughts.

Atlanta Georgia on CitySquares

Last week I wrote about the first stage of our national expansion to Delaware and Maryland. Well, the road trip continues further down south. As the weather in New England stays frigid we figured we would take our show on the road and head past the Mason Dixon into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.  Don’t worry Mountaineer faithful we didn’t skip West Virgina. We will be circling back.

The business count on the site is now around 5 million putting us almost a third of the way to our goal of 16 million. We will keep you posted on every step of our expansion so you know where we are going and when we will be there.  Up next we are heading to sunny Florida, home of Tim Tebow and the National Champion Gators, to finish off the East Coast. We then will jump out to the left coast and visit California, Oregon and Washington as well as a few others. So please head down to Atlanta, GA and check out AA Ok Bail Bonding, just kidding, but we did hear that Highland Tap is a great place for first dates and martinis.

– Bob

It’s an exciting and busy time for the development team and we will continue to update you on what states have been launched and when. Until we are national we will do a regular update on states that go live.

To give you an idea of how we’re rolling out,  we started in the northeast, are currently knocking down the mid-Atlantic states, and making our way down the coast to Florida. We will then move west towards the great Mississippi River and then jump to the Pacific coast. We’ll be skipping over a few less populous states as we roll-out and circle back to them. Our overall roll-out plan shows us launching about 40 states in 30 days.

Please feel free to reach out with any feedback or thoughts on the expansion and wish us luck.

And last but not least, happy new year from all of us at CitySquares!

– Bob

Well, it’s three years later and this past July we expanded the site to cover to all of New England and metro NY. We are one of the top 2500 sites in the nation according to Quantcast and have hundreds of paying customers. Going national seems like the next logical step doesn’t it? What are we waiting for? Grow, grow, grow! It all sounds logical and simple but in fact it’s far from it. What makes CitySquares unique is the value we provide customers. We have cultivated the site around the local communities and earnestly want to see small businesses succeed and grow. So the question wasn’t why don’t we expand, but how do we expand and preserve the essence of who we are? It’s a tough question to answer, one that we’ve been working on for some time. We don’t want to devolve into a just a national directory where the small business is buried under the national players or where the consumer’s opinion takes priority over SMBs. We care about small businesses, they’re our priority. But we also care about real-world community, offline life.

The fact is, we’ve only begun to achieve our vision. There’s so much more for us to accomplish. Our aim is to not be just a business directory or city guide, but to be the ultimate resource for local communities. Whether a county in Montana, a borough in NY, a village in Vermont, or a neighborhood in Seattle, we want to get all the information about that community, that locale, online. Get the geopolitical information online, municipal information, local government, post office, libraries, public schools, trash and recycling collection schedules, historical facts, playgrounds, parking lots, public transportation, local school lunch menus, athletic program information, July 4th fireworks locations, and so much more. CitySquares’ vision is, and has always been, to be “Your Neighborhood, Online.” Not easy, but necessary. And it will happen.

So here we are, starting our national expansion. And why? It’s simple -  there is a need. The need for the local tractor equipment company in French Lick, Indiana to be found when someone searches for local tractor equipment in French Lick, Indiana and not find John Deere in Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s about getting these small businesses online, and allowing them to be discovered by local, qualified consumers. Period. But that’s just the beginning. The rest and the best is yet to come. It may not sound or look like much right now, but as we chug along in the next couple months, the next year, and beyond, you’ll see this ultimate vision become reality.

This week CitySquares launched an additional 1.7 million businesses to fulfill the rest of New York and New Jersey as well as the entire state of Pennsylvania. We will quickly be rolling out other states to complete the national expansion. It is an exciting time for us and it’s equally exciting to see so many small businesses, mom-and-pops, across this great nation actually get online – many of them for their first time ever! This is one small step for CitySquares, one giant leap for your communities. You just wait and see.

– Co-founders, Bob Leland and Ben Saren

As of just a few days ago we now allow businesses to add even more detailed information about their establishments with a new feature called amenities. Businesses now have the ability to tell users even more about their business including such details as parking type, smoking/non-smoking, WiFi, kid friendly, take out, delivery, attire, price, and payment types accepted just to name a few. By allowing businesses to include this deeply specific information it helps users to find the important information they need about the business as well as allowing search engines to get more relevant content about a business and hence, help them rank higher too. We hope you enjoy this new information!

If you have any thoughts or feedback about new amenities you may like to see please feel free to email me. I am always here with an open ear!

-Bob

The snapshot is just one example of how amenities display on the site.

Here is an example of how this works on CitySquares.com. Let’s say you are on your laptop having a cup of coffee at True Grounds in Ball Square, Somerville and you wanted to find a flower shop so you could surprise your significant other with a gift. The thing is, you may not know where the closest flower shop is. What you would do is go to CitySquares and, providing you have Loki installed on your browser, you’d click the “Find me with Loki” button on the navigation bar. See screenshot below.

Loki then finds you, and pretty darn close to your precise location. That information is then sent to CitySquares’ search engine and you’ll taken to a business results page based on your Loki location. So it actually finds where you are and shows you what’s nearby! You can then search for “flower shops” or browse to florists with our useful faceted search feature and you will find that Capelos Floral Design is right down the street. Not bad huh? And this is just the beginning of our location based offerings, there’s more to come.

To make this all happen you do need to download and install Loki on your laptop or desktop computer. Once you’ve enabled Loki you may travel all over the Boston area and find the businesses closest to where you are.

In addition to the Loki integration we’ve really spiced up our city and neighborhood homepages with more useful features such as listing local coupons and special deals in each neighborhood. You can also now read the latest reviews for businesses on the homepage or jump to different business categories without having to navigate to the businesses page.

We are working hard to make your experience on CitySquares a fun and easy way to find local businesses and events in your neighborhood. As always feel free to ping me if you have any thoughts or feedback.

-Bob

• Faceted Search: This feature allows users to refine their search results after an initial keyword search. You may refine these results by distance, rating, reviews, location (city or neighborhood), category and alphabet. Not only does it make it easier to find what you are looking for but it also lets you explore other parts of the site with ease. Check out the screenshot below. We’ll be expanding this over the next few weeks as well, to include things like cuisine type, payment type, hours of operation, and more. Be on the lookout for that!
• Favorite Neighborhood: Users can select a favorite neighborhood. Each time you login or return to the site, while still logged in, you’ll automatically go to your saved favorite neighborhood. The “Make This My Favorite ‘Hood!” button can be found on the top of all neighborhood home pages – see the South End, for example.
• Send messages to businesses: Users can now send a business a message using the quick note feature in the business profile. On the profile page of our customers you will see a text area where you can send a question or inquiry directly to the business.
• RSS: We now offer syndicated feeds that are available for businesses on our site organized by location (city or neighborhood) and category. Please grab a feed or two for your site or subscribe to get the latest business information from CitySquares in your blog reader.

Along with these features we are always improving things behind the scenes which includes making the site run more efficiently and fixing the small things that make your browsing experience more pleasurable.

Furthermore, we have some great features coming over the next couple of weeks including enhancing the homepage to display featured categories, reviews and deals from local merchants along with an amazing new mapping feature that lets you browse the cities and neighborhoods of Greater Boston in visual manner. We’re proud that CitySquares.com is your Boston destination site. Please tune in each week for more updates on the new things we have cooking in the oven.

If you have any feedback or ideas I’d love to hear from you! Just drop me an email or drop us a comment on this blog.

– Bob