The CitySquares Blog

Entries tagged as ‘Features’

CitySquares Product Update

April 11, 2008 · 2 Comments

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”New Sidebar Features

  • “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.

New Home Page Features

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
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CitySquares Product Update

March 26, 2008 · No Comments

Welcome to the first post from the product team. We have been hard at work building new features for the site and we will be updating the blog weekly to keep you posted on the exciting things going on with the site. First and foremost I want to welcome Michael LeBarron as our new developer. He will be joining Justin Leider and myself to round out the product team and needless to say we will be working long hours to make the CitySquares.com experience grow and improve on a regular basis. Without further ado I would like to present you with the most recent roll out of features.

  • 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! Faceted Search
  • 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

Categories: Product
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