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Make Your Website Directory Standout

Make your directory stand out from the crowd. Hundreds of new directories pop up everyday, so how can someone take yours seriously from the start?

Spice it up a bit, make it more for the end-user and you might just have a business model.

Author: David Berube

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With what seems to be hundreds of new directories popping up every day or so, the challenge becomes making your directory stick out from the crowd. Most of all these new directories use the same software and the same types of themes.

I started Yutter about three weeks ago after initially getting serious about running a directory. The common theme among most the directories I visited to research before deciding to make the jump was that they all felt and looked the same. I must have looked at over 200 different directories and maybe 2 or 3 stood out in my memory as looking and feeling unique. And those were the directories that I found out to be successful.

Now Yutter is just in its infancy but I do believe it sticks out from the crowd a bit. In order to have complete control over the look and feel of Yutter we decided not to use any pre-made software but to create our own. I would definitely recommend new directories do the same but I also realize that not everyone has the same resources that we do, so using software like phpLD may be a good choice for you, but don’t just install it and hope they will come.

Our main objective with Yutter is a nice, easy to navigate user-interface. We like to think that we have that now, but we also realize that we have a long way to go to completely fulfill our goal. We picked a bright and fresh color scheme to keep it looking fresh and easy on the eyes. We also added some AJAX to the submission process to make it as painless as possible, and some popup screen shots of what the listings look like. You do not want to lose a customer at the point of submission!

Next we had to think of something new. First thing that came to mind was a random “cool sites” type thing that will display random listings and will show up on every page. At first the idea was to add all submissions to this list, but then we though why not monetize this? To my knowledge there is nothing else like this on any other directory, and I really thought it was a cool (pun intended) and innovative idea. So I made the decision to “up sell” this as an add-on to your listing. Low and behold, about a week later, over 75% of all submissions have purchased this with their listing!

I really wanted Yutter to be more than just a directory, I wanted it to be a page a user wants to make their homepage. What do most homepages have? News. Any directory owner can add this pretty seamlessly to their directory. In our case we own another web property called Scoopr which is a news aggregation company. So we made the obvious choice of integrating Scoopr into Yutter. (Note: at the time of writing this article, we have taken this section down from Yutter while we are upgrading Scoopr) The easiest way to integrate Scoopr into Yutter was to use its RSS feeds with an open source PHP RSS reader called MagpieRSS. If you know that php tags are , you should be able to use this tool. Once you have MagpieRSS installed and working head over to http://news.yahoo.com and get the top stories RSS feed and slap it into Magpie. There you go, you now have news on your directory.

The most over-looked and underused feature of any directory is its search function. Every directory I’ve been to just searches its own database for the search term. While this seems like the obvious thing to do, I think its way too simple and may be one reason why most directories never make it into the “mainstream”. What we are working on as I’m writing this is showing web results within our own internal results.

What’s this mean? When you do a search on Yutter we will return listings matching your term and results from outside of our directory using either Google or Yahoo’s search API and integrate them both together. Of course you will display your listings first then web results second. But chances are if an end-user is coming to your directory and using search they may not find what they are looking for. If creating this is too much work for you, make it easy on the user to search Google or Yahoo for the term and put it in a link if no results show up. I know this goes against contrary belief of keeping users on your pages, but it will give that person more of an inclination of returning to your page in the future!

While your at it, why not use Google Maps API and create your own mapping/local search function? Creating a simple map is pretty easy, but a more complex one would obviously be a bit more hard. I personally think Yahoo Maps is easier to integrate than Google's but you can be the judge, either way you will need to know or hire someone who knows JavaScript.

You can find a good programmer from a site like GetAFreeLancer.com or eLance.com. Although I've never actually used either site I know of a lot of happy people who have.

I’ve outlined some major things you can implement, but the little things matter just as much I like to think. Make sure your directory has a clean user-interface, I cannot stress that enough! We just added little “snap previews” to links using Snap.com. Hoover over an external pointing link and you will see what I’m talking about. It’s free and probably the easiest thing you can do to add some “spice” to your directory. Go to AccuWeather.com and grab a weather widget to put on your homepage, make your page look and act as friendly as possible.

I think Temi Odurinde of Haabaa.com has the right idea on his approach to his directory and he is promising more interesting features in the future. Keep changing and improving on your directory, if you visit Yutter or Haabaa in two months it won’t be the same site you remember.

I know Yutter and myself are relatively new to the directory “game” and I may have no authority to even be writing an article on the subject, but I’ve been in the internet business since day 1 and the same premise applies to directories as it would to a forum, game, or social network site. It must be user-friendly, dynamic and never ending.

About Author

David is the President and CEO of Yutter Internet Directory
http://www.yutter.com

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