See the USA on Your PDA!

Where do you find information about a community you're moving your family to? You might do what I did when I relocated from Florida to Illinois almost 20 years ago -- write to the Chamber of Commerce of the community and ask for information.

Back in 1988, the Chamber sent me a fat envelope of brochures, maps, a Chamber membership directory, real estate magazines, and a list of municipal services and contact phone numbers. I waded through the booklets and maps and guides to try to find information about housing, daycare, utilities, shopping, recreation -- all the things one likes to know about, or at least be a little familiar with, before arriving at one's new home.

Today, in 2007, I would instead simply log onto www.villageprofile.com and look up that community I was looking into 19 years ago: Naperville, Illinois. Naperville is just one of the more than 1,200 towns, villages and cities that are found on Village Profile's Community Profile Network (CPN).

The home page of Village Profile leads you easily to where you want to "go." A pull-down menu in the box titled "Tour Our Communities" to the right of the screen lets you choose from nine regions of the US. From there you're taken to a menu of states, from states to the communities available in the CPN database for a "virtual tour."

Don't expect to find simple lists of facts and figures about the communities you decide to visit. These community profiles are very comprehensive and interesting to read, with the text edited into such quality-of-life categories as Location & Transportation, Education, Homes & Neighborhoods, Recreation, Arts & Culture, Shopping & Dining, Business & Industry, even chapters on government, worship, calendars of events, and more. Some communities have more information than others, or the information is more in-depth, but there is more than plenty of information on every community in the database.