Upmystreet is one of the most popular places on the Internet for finding local information. The site is just two web pages, but they link to powerful databases covering statistics such as house prices, crime rates, school league tables and the e-mail addresses of local MPs. Upmystreet has won praise from Internet users because it manages to be useful, relevant and simple. The site is attracting significant commercial interest, as well, and already has adverts for Virgin’s One Account mortgage and the online insurance broker Screentrade.
Upmystreet was created by Aztec, an internet consultancy whose clients include the Financial Times and the BBC.

The site, according to the Aztec chairman, Ian Charles Stewart, was designed as a technology showcase for the company. At the time, Aztec had no website, but Stewart was reluctant to build a standard online brochure. “I don’t like brochure sites, and I wanted a site that says something about us,” he explains.What Stewart hoped to say was that websites can be simple and still be effective; that good data is more important than lavish designs, and that a market-leading site can be built in a short space of time for little money. It took Aztec around five weeks to design and build Upmystreet.This included compiling the data, which is a combination of public and paid- for information and the company’s own research.The success has prompted Aztec to create a separate company to run the site. The new operation will be headed by Tony Blin-Stoyle, a co-founder of FT , the Financial Times’s web operation and a co-director of FT Electronic Publishing.

Blin-Stoyle admits that leaving a senior position in a large company is never an easy move, but it is a risk he is willing to take because he truly believes in the idea behind Upmystreet.”I am putting my money and my career into it because I have so much belief in it,” he says. “Opportunities like this do not come along that often, and when they do, you have to grab them. I believe we can build a very very powerful site very quickly. We already have a significant amount of traffic for a UK site.”The strength of Upmystreet lies in the basic idea. It is something many others could have thought of, but no one did.

Aztec wanted to build a website that showed its database capabilities. As a promotional project, resources were limited, so the focus was on information that is either free or can be licensed at a reasonable cost. “We wanted to do something that was useful and elegant,” explains Stewart. “We looked at local information because we wanted it to be useful in real life, not just on the Net.”When Aztec started work on Upmystreet, both Blin-Stoyle and Stewart were buying houses. Data such as property price, lists of the best schools and crime rates is the sort of information that home buyers value but estate agents cannot always provide. “We wanted to aggregate the information that influences home-buying decisions, and we were looking for data that was freely available,” he says.Much of the information that Upmystreet provides is available to private individuals but not in one single place – let alone one single Internet site.

According to Stewart, the data came in myriad forms: diskette, paper, tape, e-mail. To make Upmystreet work, the data had to be cleaned up and aggregated into a single database. Stewart also set out to create a site where the information is only one click away. Visitors to Upmystreet only need to enter their postcodes and select a topic from a pull-down menu to find the local data they want.This simplicity means that around 95 per cent of visitors to Upmystreet click though to the second – and final – page. “As the site evolves, it might not be quite as simple as it is now,” concedes Stewart But maintaining relevance is still a priority. Upmystreet has no plans to become a portal, a magazine or an online trading community.”We don’t want to put things in that are superfluous,” says Stewart. “Our goal is to make sure every single element of the service is relevant, right through to any sponsors and advertisers.”Blin-Stoyle agrees.