Hyperlocal Site Offers Personal Touch

Members of a new hyperlocal website can customise its features to create their own neighbourhood home page.

Backyard Post offers information guides to over 200 hyperlocal areas in Florida’s West Palm Beach, including regularly updated data on the housing market, schools, parks and libraries.

And registered members who just want to know about news and activities in their neighbourhood can create their own home page.

The site belongs to the Palm Beach Post and is the brainchild of several of the newspaper’s team, including online innovations editor William H Hartnett.

On the Backyard Post blog, Hartnett explains the website’s customisable aspects: “You’ll have to sign up to take advantage of these features, but in return we’ll let you set up your very own Backyard Post home page, too.

“Choose your neighbourhood, set your own news preferences and Backyard Post is no longer our site, it’s your site.”

The team has spent over a year mapping neighbourhoods and collating facts and figures ranging from property transactions dating from 1995 to school performance scores and park opening times.

And Hartnett promises that housing information will be updated five times a week -“who says real estate can't be a spectator sport?”

Backyard Post is looking to include more neighbourhoods as the year progresses.