Celebrating a Launch: MyLocalPark.com

I’ve been quiet recently, I know. I spent the last 4-weeks working on a personal project; a small tech. start-up named MyLocalPark.com. As businesses go, it’s not huge. But, I believe it has some potential for traffic.

The genesis of the website was a morning in which my wife asked me to find a park to take our two-year-old to that evening. On her way out the door to work, she said she wanted the park to have a great play area, and not be one he had been to before. This should have been easy to find on the web, but surprisingly wasn’t. The easiest to find content, off of the various city-websites local to us, showed a single small picture of each park’s sign, and an anemic blurb of little help. If you dug enough, you could find user reviews, which are always helpful, but they were on third-party websites not specializing in parks, and had no pictures.

My wife and I actually love the Amazon shopping experience. Mostly it’s the user reviews, unbiased reviews of any product from a multitude of sources. So the idea behind MyLocalPark.com is to pair the Amazon-like user experience, with a catalog of parks. Of course, Amazon isn’t the only website out their with a great user experience, so they’re not our sole inspiration.

Being a web developer, of course I’m using this project to try out some new ideas of my own. I’ll be blogging about these experiences as I encounter them, and hopefully you’ll benefit from this as much as I’m sure I will.

In any case, MyLocalPark.com was just launched yesterday as a beta. Please check it out. I’ve already made some changes to the UX since launch (more about that is another post). As developers, you might be especially interested in the Development Roadmap.