One of the many genres of website is the business directory. This seemed to become very popular during the early and mid 2000's with most following the pattern of having many listings with paid listings that gravitated to the top of lists with more information on them.
There are a few problems with this approach. First, there are many out-of-the-box solutions and Joomla has a handful of plug and play modules. Also, when looking for a business why not just go ahead and use Google?
Second, it's obvious that the listings at the top of the search results page are paid listings which consciously or sub-consciously leads the user to believe that the results are rigged. Before the Google revolution this is how search results were listed.
There are also some paradoxes of business directories. First, if you charge to allow more information (link to website, photos, ect.) about a business in their listing that means that the end user will be getting less from the directory and therefore will not use it. Do you put more information in the listings to attract more people to use the site? What about reviews? Wouldn't that be useful to had use contributed reviews? What happens when someone is giving you $150 a year for a listing and everybody hates their product? Should you let them erase the bad reviews on their listing? That's good for them but it's bad, once again, for the end user because the listings are not useful without the unbiased information.
I've been looking at many business directories over the last few months and still can't believe that developers haven't been using Google's model of putting useful results first and then on the side adding paid results.
Does anybody have any theory on business directories? What is the purpose of a business directory? Do you actually use business directories? I don't but people keep asking me to build them.
I don't think that building a directory module is the best solution. There should be a series of recipes using CCK, Views, and other modules.
Here are two business directories that I like. First, is the Urban Spoon ( http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/3/1511353/restaurant/Nolita/Pulinos-Bar-and-... ) What is interesting about this is that it function like a wiki with many people being able to add and edit information about listings. My list of modules that would going into creating a directory like this would be:
CCK
Views
Voting API
OpenLayers or Google map tools module
Revisioning module, Module grants and Rules to create workflows with rules to manage emails (this is used to create a wiki editing functionality)
Finder module or Faceted search module to sort through the directory
Here is the other directory. It has a nice UI. http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocalMaps-g298484-d691623-Cafe_Pushkin-Area.html .
