Directory Website Examples, and How to Build Your Own

A directory website lists many businesses, places or things of one kind so people can search and compare them. This video gives ten directory website examples, from local business guides and restaurant guides to property listings, events, jobs and classified ads.

Transcript

What is a directory website? It is a site that lists many businesses, places or things of one kind, so people can search and compare them. Each entry has its own page. Visitors narrow the list with search and filters. And there is often a map, and reviews. Here are the common examples. A local business guide for one town. A restaurant guide. A site for hotels and places to stay. Property listings. A directory of doctors and clinics. And one for schools or courses. Four more. An events calendar. Job listings. Places to visit. And classified ads, where people list things for sale. That is ten kinds of directory website, and each one is the same idea with different details. What changes from one to the next is the fields. A restaurant needs its cuisine, a price range and opening hours. A property needs bedrooms, size and price. An event needs a date. So good directory software lets every kind of listing have fields of its own. Here is a real directory, on a WordPress site. A visitor picks restaurants, and the list and the map narrow together. Or they browse by category, when they do not know a name yet. Every entry has its own page, with its details, its photos and its location. And reviews from customers, which are the reason people come back to a directory and not to a plain list. Who should build one? Anyone people already ask. Who is good at this? Where can I find one near me? Which one would you pick? If you run a club, an association, a local news site or a blog about one subject, you already have the audience. A directory gives them a reason to return. Building your own takes four steps. Pick the listing types you need. Add the first listings yourself, or import them from a file. Open the form, so people can submit their own. Then approve what comes in, and let it grow. This is that form. Someone with a business to list signs in and chooses what kind of listing it is, and the questions change to fit. The finished listing can wait for your approval before anyone sees it. Many directories begin as a list on a page. A list is one long page. A directory gives every entry a page of its own. A list is read from top to bottom. A directory has search, filters and a map. You update a list alone. In a directory, owners update their own entries, and customers add the reviews. A list stops being useful once it is too long to scan. Every month you keep adding to one, the move to a real directory gets bigger. WB Listora is the directory plugin for WordPress. Pick your kind of directory, and start it this week. Get WB Listora. The link is below.