View all blog posts about this local web directory.
Background: I’ve been working on a local Devon business directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.
2 - 11 September, 2007:
2/9 Phoned my mother and brother and asked them to add listings. Of course, my mother’s registration email doesn’t arrive. I check and can’t see anything wrong, so to my shame, I assume the problem is something to do with her relatively new email setup, which seems to have problems with spam filtering. I create her membership and she adds a basic listing for a local charity, the Adventure Trust for Girls - thanks mum!
3/9 Emailed 2 friends, 2 former potential customers, a classmate from my business startup programme and also a local woman whose children’s activities I’d been taking the kids to. I offer them every feature free if they’ll help by adding a listing to test it out. They mostly say ‘That email was so long, I’ll read it later’. Nobody adds anything 
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Once the site was ready enough to go online, I added Statcounter code and set it up to send me weekly summary reports by email. I’ve also written about each week’s triumphs and mishaps in more detail, to be serialized here in this blog (woohoo, exciting!) - just choose the
‘Launching a local directory’ category of posts to read all of them.
As a brief summary to anyone reading this post first, the website is a Joomla / Sobi2 based local directory for the county of Devon, which accepts family friendly free listings with a focus on arts and environmental groups, and offers paid-for extra features such as maps, galleries, ecards etc (some of which are free for artists and environmental groups).
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(The first couple of months, warts and all)
View all blog posts about launching my local web directory.
Background: I’ve been working on a Devon directory with a focus on promoting arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.
Summary: Once the website got to the point of being presentable enough, I started gradually making it more available, while continuing to work on the site, and beginning to actively promote it. This is how I did that and what happened.
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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.
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