Entries categorized as ‘Product’
Our last product update was a while ago, but that certainly doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing anything. Quite the contrary in fact, we’re so busy we often forget to go home! Our last update went over our Business Amenities feature, which has been very well received by our customers. Since then we’ve been pretty quiet on the blog, but we’ve kept ourselves busy behind the scenes with a few changes to the front-end of the website that you may have noticed browsing around, and lots of changes to the back-end to support our increasing traffic.
First, the front end; we’ve updated our product information page to give businesses a better idea of what we do and what we’re about. Along with that we’ve upgraded the process for adding your own business information. You’ll see a call-to-action to add your business in the top right of the product page, or check it out here. You do have to be logged in to add your business so if you don’t yet have an account at CitySquares.com now is a great time to get signed up. We were getting a lot of duplicate entries and we realized people needed an easy way to search for their business before they added it. So our new ‘add business’ form integrates a live search as you type - so if you’re already on our site your listing will appear and you can just edit the existing information!
Along with the new add business process we have added a new eCommerce system so you can find and purchase your business listing all online! Currently your only option is to upgrade to a deluxe listing, but we’re hoping to expand that to include other options in the future. I encourage you to sign up and see if your business is already listed for free and of course check out our awesome upgrade options!
You may also have noticed that our banner ads have changed slightly - you can see those throughout the site. We made the move to IAB standard size ads in early September along with our ad management system overhaul. We are now using Google AdManager to serve up all the ads you see across the site, which allows us to easily serve up Google AdSense in locations that we have unsold inventory or choose to display them. As of now we have set it up so our paying local advertisers will always trump AdSense in priority so we maintain our hyper-local focus. We have also worked in a pretty neat system where we’re able to provide banner advertising site-wide all the way down to a specific neighborhood and anywhere in between. You could even exclusively buy select neighborhoods if you chose to target your ads.
Otherwise we’ve been pretty quiet on the front end, but we’ve got some big changes coming soon. I can’t show you everything yet, but I can provide a couple sneak peeks.
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New Search Options
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Restyled Reviews
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More All Stars
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More Featured Businesses
Besides the usual bug fixes, that’s pretty much everything on the front end. On the back end, we have moved our infrastructure onto Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 using RightScale to manage our instances. Justin is blogging our experience over at his blog. I’d recommend going there to get more details on what we’ve done, there’s way too much information for just one post.
Outside of the infrastructure changes, we’ve been going through all of our database queries and optimizing as much as possible, tweaking and removing where necessary, and trying to get every bit of performance our of our current system as possible.
So we’ve been pretty busy as of late, with much more to come as we expand the site to new areas. Keep an eye out for changes and we’ll do our best to keep you updated here.
As always, we love to hear from you so, if you have any thoughts, please leave us a note in the comments!
– Michael
Categories: Product
Tagged: admanager, adsense, amazon, back-end, business listings, compete, EC2, front-end, google, IAB, Product, quantcast, RightScale, S3, self-provision, traffic
It has been a while since we have introduced some new videos, so here are a few that are sure to make your mouth water! If you are a chocolate lover, you are going to LOVE these two new videos!
Chocolee Chocolates in South End, Boston is an adorable boutique chocolate shop that specializes in handmade chocolates and truffles.
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All Things Chocolate is located in the heart of Boston in the Back Bay. This family run business offers a variety of chocolates and candies. They do a beautiful job of creating delicious gifts for all occasions.
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I hope you were able to make it through both of these videos before having to run down the street for your chocolate fix!
We have many other videos that I cant wait to show you. Stay tuned!
– Kim
Categories: Customers · Product · Videos
Tagged: All things Chocolate, Back Bay, Boston, chocolate, Chocolee Chocolates, citysquares, south end, video
Something that CitySquares‘ product team works very hard at is a little something called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It’s very important that our advertisers get maximum visibility online through their CitySquares profile. The more detailed information we have about particular businesses, the easier it is for them to get higher results in search engines like Google or Yahoo!. You see, search engines, especially Google, love context. They like content, but they love context, and they’re only getting smarter about it. CitySquares advertisers are given the ability to add content like general descriptions, services/products offered, hours of operation, photos and even videos. Users of the website can also add reviews. This combination gives the business’ profile a lot more context.
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.
Categories: Product
Tagged: amenities, dough east boston, Product, seo
As pointed on on several blogs and in the print media, CitySquares has expanded our website beyond the Metro Boston area and into the rest of New England as well as the Metro NYC area! This is a big and exciting step for us! This expansion of the website brings the total number of businesses from about 64,000 to 1.4 million! Thats a 22x increase!
With this expansion we’ve had to build a new home page at the root of CitySquares.com. Historically, when you go to CitySquares.com you’d be brought directly to the Boston page on the site, or to your favorite neighborhood, if you’ve saved one. Now, the new home page will bring users to the very top of the site, and allow the drill down by state, region, city, and neighborhood. The home page is very dynamic too, with a clever Top Cities and Quick Look feature.
The real objective behind this expansion is to meet the demand we’re seeing in communities outside of metro Boston to bring our Buy Local message, local search solution there. Both businesses and consumers have made themselves heard loud and clear, and this is just a first step in meeting their needs.
With this expansion we’re following our original model of taking a bottoms-up approach to building an online community based on neighborhood and community locales. With so much data, it’s a challenge, but that’s why the product team (Bob, Justin, and Michael) has literally slept in the office to accomplish this, and they did a fantastic job! We’re very proud of those guys for their efforts and for going above and beyond to get this done.
We’re excited to see the search engines sink their teeth into this data and ultimately bring the value of CitySquares.com to consumers across the northeast! If anyone has any questions about this expansion, or about advertising, or anything else, please don’t hesitate to email me or call me at (617) 459-4922. There are some small wrinkles we need to iron out too, so expect to see some nice little tweaks over the coming days and weeks.
– Ben
Categories: General · Product
Tagged: bronx, brooklyn, connecticut, expansion, localeze, long island, maine, manhattan, maponics, massachusetts, new england, new hampshire, new york, new york city, queens, rhode island, rockland county, staten island, vermont, westchester county
The product team is proud to announce the integration of Loki, a location based search utility that allows us to find you with one click of a button and display local businesses that are closest to you. Loki is developed by our good friends over at Skyhook Wireless.
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
Categories: Product
Tagged: Coupons, location, loki, skyhook wireless
We’ve been hard at work on some home page updates for the past week and rolled them out to CitySquares.com last night. Here’s a rundown of the additions:
Down the right side of each city and neighborhood homepages we’ve got two new sections: “Featured Deals” and “Featured Reviews”
- “Featured Deals” highlights deals and coupons currently being offered by businesses. Watch this section to get some great discounts on local businesses in your area.
- “Featured Reviews” highlights recently posted business reviews in your area. Read what others are saying, or post your own review!
In addition to the sidebar changes we’ve reworked the entire business listing section.
- “Browse By Category” allows you to jump directly to a specific category right from the home page.
- “Browse By Popular Tags” lets you search for the most popular tags in your area.
- You’ll also see a featured video from our video library of local businesses. And keep your eyes peeled for even more videos coming to the site shortly.
Even better, every one of these features is location specific. Love the Back Bay? Every Deal, Review, Tag, and Category featured on the Back Bay home page is tailored specifically to that area. Prefer Harvard Square? No problem, with our true hyper-local focus, you’ll get only the best local business information.
We’re not sitting back and relaxing yet though, we’ve got a number of features planned for the coming weeks to improve the user experience and make it even easier to find what you’re looking for. We’ll be adding amenities information for restaurants, so you can know ahead of time what type of payment they accept, if they take reservations, what type of cuisine they offer, and what the ambiance is like.
Also upcoming on the home page is a section we like to call “What’s Hot.” This will give you a quick look at the top rated businesses in a number of popular categories for your location.
Something else in the wings, and a bit of a pilot test, is a new way to contact businesses directly and search for what you need. Enter your phone number and what you’re looking for, businesses matching your search are automatically contacted to match your needs, and you are automatically and anonymously connected when a match is found. Your phone number remains private, you get exactly what you need, and save time calling them all yourself.
Well that’s all we’ve got for this week. As always, feedback and ideas are welcome, leave a comment or send an email. Check back next week for the latest updates, and keep checking the site for new features!
-Michael
Categories: Product
Tagged: Coupons, Deals, Features, Product, Reviews, Search
Bob, Justin and Michael (the three amigos making up our Product Team) have worked their tails off to bring you a very cool new feature that we’re very proud of. This feature is also brought to you in part by Maponics, a new CitySquares content partner.
In a nutshell, this new Neighborhood Map feature allows you to navigate through the Boston area using only a map. You can hop around the site from neighborhood to neighborhood using just a map! And now we show those neighborhood boundaries! You can see for yourself on CitySquares.com. Just click the “Navigate by Map” button.
This new Neighborhood Map feature is just our first release too. We’ve got some very clever ideas in the works, including more neighborhood boundaries and more user friendly features. It won’t be long now that we’ll be able to guess where you are too. So if you’re at, say, Angora Cafe in Kenmore Square, we’d like to be able to automatically know that and take you right to Kenmore Square on CitySquares. Ya know? OK, I tend to get a little excited about this stuff. More on that later though.
So we just wanted to announce this cool new feature to you all. Oh, and hey, we’re open to your suggestions and feedback too. Just shoot an email to Bob!
If you’re interested, please click here for the official press release on the CitySquares/Maponics partnership.
– Ben
Categories: Press · Product
Tagged: angora cafe, Boston, kenmore square, maponics, maps, neighborhood, Product
Here at CitySquares, we are engaged in a constant push to keep our site fresh, fun, and functional. With that goal in mind we are proud to announce the latest addition to our Citysquares enhanced customer profiles, Profile Videos!
CitySquares customers now have an option to have a low coast, professionally shot and edited video on their business profile page. These videos run about 60 seconds on average, and give potential customers a fantastic look into the venues, food, decor, and services of the local businesses that they are interested in. Other than that… they just plain look AWESOME!
Take a look:
The Fireplace in Washington Square, Brookline
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James Joseph Studio in Medford, MA
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Smoken’ Joe’s BBQ in Brighton Center, Boston
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We will be adding many more videos as they are finished! Keep an eye out for Clevergreen Cleaners, Husky Express, WUL!
Categories: Customers · Product · Videos
Tagged: clevergreen cleaners, james joseph salon, Smoken Joes, the fireplace, video, WUL
I’ve long believed that at the heart of our communities, be they urban neighborhoods or rural villages, there are a few things that define the character of the community. Those things are…
Ben Saren
Amber Killingsworth
Justin Leider
Michael LeBarron
bleland
kimmyh
juliecaroline
chehadej
