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.

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

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.

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

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