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

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