Building regional directories

Creating large site with state/city type listings

[nuevojefe]

Sorry to admins if there is a better category, I just didn't see one...

I am trying to create a large directory of widgets listed by state, then broken down further to cities. I've got some competitors with huge sites where they have everything listed as I just described. I know they built the whole site in 4-6 weeks, and they must have used a datebase or something to plug in and create all those city/state listings.

Anyone know where I can find some resources to figure out how to do this? I want to create this quickly and focus on the content later.

Thanks

[tombola]

To start a regional directory of your widgets, browse through DMOZ [dmoz.org] and see whether they have regional listings for your widgets. Then download the RDF dumps at [rdf.dmoz.org...] and extract the categories you need. You'll have now a basis to build your own regional widget directory.

[danieljean]

nuevojefe- I'm moving away from those types of directories towards more user-friendly interfaces.

When lots of vendors are in a state, it's hard to tell if you should look for a suburb of your city (or which one), and if more than one is there, which is closest. A better solution for the end-user is to geocode every directory entry with latitude and longitude. The end user then only neeeds to enter their zip or postal code, and you can calculate which are the closest, returning only those results.

Of course, those two things are not mutually exclusive. Geocoding will take a bit more time, but you will have a much better value for end-users than the competition! :)