Forum Moderators: phranque
We are a regional company that advertises nation wide (ppc/yellow pages). We've decided we want to take advantage of the traffic from outside of our region, and partner with other sites.
Due to this being relatively common, we've decided to offer our own twist on a directory by using a PPC model to help us sell to advertisers (our industry is not web savvy and either just throws money at things, or runs and hides in a corner when you mention the web).
We want an easy way for people to find offices near them based on geographic and service data. We're still debating whether to use a zip code search, or state maps. (and thinking about using both). So we'd need a data base where we can put in an office's services and address, and then when someone goes to a page, it queries the database and serves up the list of locations. Although, for some states like CA, we'd want it broken down by region as people in N CA don't care an office exists is S CA.
We'd also want to be able to just list off a state, as for PPC advertising, if someone searches for x office in MD, we want to serve them just MD locations and let them have a search option for the rest of the U.S. So we're talking about mixing a database with conventional HTML pages.
I don't know about programming a zip code search, espeically if you want a 100 mile radius search from the searches address to every location within that radius as they'll be in different zip codes, and how much information is necessary about zip codes and addresses to make this feasible or not.
And lastly, we'd need to know how many unique visitors the office pages get per day as we're going to charge per unique visitor, and we don't want to worry about fraud so we can show people we've already done something about it. Some of these pages will have external links, so we'll have to know how many unique people went to x site from ours in a day, and others might have an info page on our site, so we'd need to know how many unique visitors that page got per day. But if one visitor went to 3 different office pages in a day, 3 offices will be charged, and if the person returned to an office they'd already been to in that calendar day, the office won't be charged.
As there will be a lot of info on these pages, and should naturally rank well in the engines, we also want them indexable by the engines, as we don't care if someone went from G straight to an office page (the ones we're actually charging for) as that was a unique visitor.
The database will also change as we add/lose advertisers, so we'd need an easy way to update it once it's created.
I hope this is enough info to get some feedback as to what we're looking for and the easiest way to go about it.
Thanks again for the input and corrections to my logic.
We've had some discussions surrounding many of the features you want to include in your project but it sounds to me as if you need a programmer. I doubt there is any "off the shelf" software that incorporates most (or even many) of the features you seek.
Anyone?
You can purchse databases that are broken down by longitude and latitude for a zip code. Using that data you can work out the distance from one place to another. I worked on a yellow pages project for a major net company providing this sort of stuff. Complex and problematic stuff - good luck!
Web programmers are different than database programmers, though often we wear both hats.
Be prepared to pay good money for a good database programmer.
