Good examples of neighborhood/community websites?

April 3, 2009 12:28 PM

Examples of good urban neighborhood community websites?

I'm webmaster for my city neighborhood association's website and right now it's pretty rudimentary in its content. and I'd like to see what some other places have on their sites. We live in a small (~500) resident historical downtown neighborhood in a old rust belt city. I volunteered to update our website and I'm OK with the technical aspects and I'm going to re-use the existing design but I'd like to get a better idea of what a good community organization website has in it.

The website needs to address two different sets of users: people who live there and people who are visiting. For the residents, I'd like to have things like: information about city services, the historical review process, information about the neighborhood council, a calendar of meetings, urban foresting information, etc. For visitors it would be information about neighborhood events/tours, self guided tours, information about businesses in the area, directions, parking information, etc.

I'm planning on converting the site which someone else made a few years ago with Adobe Page Mill to run on a CMS system, probably Wordpress or Drupal so any sites that you point me to that are running either of those would be great.

posted by octothorpe to computers & internet (9 comments total)

brooklynian.com
posted by billtron at 12:42 PM on April 3

I really like my neighborhood association's website. It ain't pretty, but it has awesome content, including lots of history.
posted by Stewriffic at 2:05 PM on April 3 [1 favorite has favorites]

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Prince of Petworth is the best neighborhood blog I've ever seen, and I wish more local governments would host blogs like this.
posted by lunasol at 2:41 PM on April 3

The Western Neighborhoods Project
posted by alexei at 4:13 PM on April 3

I run a community site that gets good use.
posted by john m at 5:17 PM on April 3

I like this one for Third Street Promenade & Downtown Santa Monica.
posted by invisible ink at 6:54 PM on April 3

The Davis Wiki is pretty well known. Bonus points: the backend is wiki, so you dont have to do anything to admin it - AND since its a wiki, other people can help you build it.
posted by jmnugent at 7:15 PM on April 3

Chicago's New Communities Program website has links to a bunch of community sites.
posted by yarrow at 8:20 PM on April 3

Thanks all. That'll give me some good inspiration. Now to figure out what CMS and/or framework to use to build the thing. I'll probably be asking some web development questions in the next few months.
posted by octothorpe at 11:06 AM on April 9