How I made my website: a Joomla based local directory
It took a village to make this (Devon directory) and it took me several months to complete it.*
I’d been experimenting with Joomla! and Drupal, and one of the first things I found was that Joomla! has several options for purpose built business directory extensions, and Drupal doesn’t have any (at least it didn’t at the time). Joomla also seemed a lot more user friendly. So I went for Joomla.
I decided to minimise complications by sticking with one of the default Joomla templates (rhuk_solarflare_il) - I just changed the graphics and colours to be more artistic and Devon-like. I also tweaked the PHP of the template to some extent, eg replacing a couple of module positions with the Featured Artist spot.
The directory itself was the next thing to consider. I looked at the Joomla extensions site and chose Sobi2 directory from Sigsiu.net because it was free, had good reviews and lots of features, and a forum that seemed active and helpful. It’s proved to be a good choice, for all those reasons, and I’ve been using it at work as well. I also installed OpenSEF for search engine friendly URLs, because the Sobi forums recommended it and there is a Sobi extension for it. It’s added a lot of extra complication, but I think it’s worth it to get more meaningful addresses.
I think possibly a less detailed directory would get more entries in, but Google and co seem like they may be coming down on that sort of thing. Then I saw a flyer from a local Chinese takeaway on the pavement, and they had a web address that was obviously a directory, subdomain or page of something else. So I decided the directory could be something a lot more featured and detailed than a link directory, perhaps providing an inexpensive internet presence for people starting up in self employment, or sole traders who might not ever want to spring for the cost of a full website but could still do with somewhere to present themselves on the internet. And for those who do have a website, it’s another way to get it noticed and found. Fingers crossed.
The next thing I got to play with was modules and module positioning. I used Mod HTML to set up modules for the Google AdSense.
Given my customers to date, I thought it would also be good to provide an arts focus, firstly to provide them with more publicity and also because it would make the site look a lot nicer!
So I added some more features, including e-cards from RWCards, image galleries and a randomly displaying ‘Featured Artist’ spot with a corresponding information page. I needed some way for members to upload these so I added the perForms form component, which seems to work well.
I added a members’ news section using the content management features of Joomla, set up RSS feeds to bring in a Devon news section, and installed the VFM component to provide a downloads area. I offered Devon flags to download in various sizes because it was something I had been looking for myself. Then I thought of other things to download and made provision for a coupons area.
I wanted members to be able to find and edit their listings easily, so I installed Community Builder and its Sobi2 plugin. This provides user profiles with contributions listed and accessible for editing. This also had to replace the login and registration module.
I added an events calendar using JCal Pro. I think it’s ok, although the mini calendar, which I’d like to use, unfortunately breaks the layout. I was undecided about the front page anyway so I ended up just not using it. But I liked that the calendar had the potential to bring in musical events. In theory I could add music and video to download from the directory pages, but I don’t think my hosting allows this.
Then Google maps arrived, because I needed to do a lot of test work on them for another site. They became an extra feature for directory listings and also a feature to offer from the menu. UK postcodes caused a lot of problems, and basically did not work, so I used a clickable map (provided by the Sobi2 people) to fetch latitude and longitude coordinates instead.
The final artsy feature (so far) was the jBook Book Catalogue component. It’s a great idea, but I ended up having to do quite a lot of PHP tweaking to get this one working on my site: the book reviews were not working with the search engine friendly urls, and then when I turned off SEF URLs for that section, the reviews would be posted again every time I reloaded the page. So I added some session variables to sort that out, but it could still do with some work on the URLs.
Lastly, I installed BannersManager and its Sobi2 plugin, because I wanted to test out more flexible banner management, tailoring the display of banners for different sections of the site and different categories within the directory. I applied for a selection of affiliate programs via TradeDoubler and was somewhat astonished when they approved my site - I’ve been working on this too long!
View all blog posts about this local web directory.
(*optimistic comment - in fact I am still continually ‘completing’ it - tinkering, updating and adjusting and so on!)