Boston Condo Blog Gets Upgrade

We’re excited to announce that the Boston Condo Blog received a significant upgrade recently.  We added a host of new features and content types on top of a clean and easy to navigate homepage. After listening to a lot of reader feedback, we attempted to incorporate as many of your suggestions as possible in an effort to make daily visits to the Boston Condo Blog more enjoyable and information rich.

In revamping the site, we focused much of our attention in the following areas.

Look and Feel – The redesigned homepage represents a single portal where you can quickly scan all the activity on the Boston Condo Blog. The homepage brings all of our featured stories, videos, blog posts, user comments, and information pages into a central place. A quick glance over the page should catch you up on the latest headlines in the Boston real estate market, and allow you to easily dive deeper into what interests you.

Navigation – We attempted to consolidate navigation across the site so that it takes you less clicks to get to what you actually want to see, and inherently, absorb a greater breadth of information because it’s more intuitive and less time consuming to move around.  For instance, in the right-hand sidebar, we’ve added a user friendly feature that gives you one click access to the most popular posts, our latest stories, user comments, tags, and a subscribe (both via rss and now email as well) button – all of these are available without reloading or being taken to a new webpage.

Featured Articles – A centerpiece for the new site are three featured articles that rotate through a flash-based viewer accompanied by a photo and a story excerpt.  Our featured articles aim to provide deeper content than some of our traditional blog posts, leverage exclusive photos, and attempt to provide a unique angle on Boston real estate stories. In the future, you might even see prominent and recognized voices in the real estate community contributing articles into this area of the site.

Advertising – The Boston Condo Blog has grown significantly in popularity over the past year, mostly because of the deep and rich exclusive content and photos that we provide to daily readers.  We’ve gone out and built a portfolio of advertisers, and will continue to do so, encompassing what we think is appropriate, reputable, and complementary to the Boston Condo Blog and what our readers have come to expect.  We’re excited to see this area of the site grow, and we think it will be a good fit for both readers and advertisers.

Professional Photography – In a constant effort to raise the bar in providing solid content to our readers, we’ve partnered with Aaron Leclerc, a professional photographer based in New England, to provide professional photography for our featured articles and blog posts.  By bringing Aaron into the fold, we’ve energized some of our stories with unparalleled photography, and look forward to further contributions of exclusive high-quality photos from Aaron.

Video – Moving forward, you’ll see more and more video here on the site – we now have a dedicated category for it, and a homepage viewer for the most recent clips.  The homepage viewer will, again, lessen the number of clickthroughs that a reader has to make to get to content that interests them.  Our Boston condo videos will give viewers a different look at Boston real estate, one that oftentimes cannot be captured in still photography, regardless of how good it is.  Video will be a fun and innovative way to see more of the real estate market in Boston.

The changes are somewhat all encompassing across the site, and represent a significant step towards a more sophisticated and informative (more than simply a blog) Boston real estate destination on the Internet. We thank you for the continued readership of the Boston Condo Blog, and we’ll continue to listen to reader feedback in an effort to make this site the premier Boston real estate related website.