I'm interested in hearing thoughts about filling your directory up with information. There's three approaches I can think of:
1) Build the structure and wait for people to add their own businesses
2) Get out the phone book and do it yourself (or hire someone)
3) Contact businesses and encourage them to either give you info or do it themselves
I'm doing a combination of the three on mine. While I'm still working on the structure, it's open for people to add things themselves. When I get more of the infrastructure done, I plan on doing some bulk adding of businesses myself. Once the site is doing a bit better, I'm going to contact businesses and encourage them to come take over their ads.
I would love to just stick with #1 since that's the easiest but it gets in a catch-22. With no content on my site, no one goes there and no one adds anything so there's no content. The only way I'm going to break out of that is to add stuff myself.
So what are you doing?
Michelle
Comments
From my own experience
From my own experience adding a bulk of content first and then emailing to spread awareness to already added businesses and new ones is the best way to start. There are not that many people that will believe into your business model/site right from the start, so making them feel that they are not the first, and (at the same time) not last to find out is a good thing. Also it's crucial to show all the benefits of the membership and make it extremely easy to take advantage of all the options you're making available for your members. So, usability is crucial. Also, if you're going to write emails to potential members, element of urgency would probably benefit you as well... i.e. Register by 12/31/07 and get full benefits for life... or something along those lines. You gotta keep those people happy who help you to get to the next level.
I'm working on something right now where business listings are actually usernodes... this means I can not add a business listings as admin, unless I actually create profiles for each business (going through user registration etc)... I could do that manually, but then how do I organize ability to claim profiles... I don't think there is a module for that.... it's a lot of manual labor unless I figure out my own claim module.
Good tips
Thanks for the tips. You're right that I should put some date on there.
I don't advise making usernodes into your listings. I went down the route of making usernodes into user profiles against fago's advice and regretted it. Usernodes are best at simply being nodes to represent users and nothing else.
Right now, I'll just change the username on a listing manually if a business wants to take it over. My future plan, though, is to have each node generate a password which will be sent to the business along with the notice that they have been listed. Then they'll just need to enter the password to take it over.
Michelle
I can see the downside of
I can see the downside of usernodes like you pointed out... but I'm actually using it. Here is the reason, and may be you can give me a tip on how to get around it without usernodes:
Since I have multiple node types that form multi-page business profile (combined by nodefamily and pagerout), I needed the business name to be part of the title for each created node. Additional nodes are used for specific purpose i.e. Bio, Photos etc. and I needed it to be "Business name - Node Title" - this way titles are consistent and at the same time unique on the site, and I can easily manage them from the backend as well. I wanted to use Autotitles which uses tokens to insert them into the node title field and automatically hides the title field when node being edited or created. The only problem was, that tokens could be only used from fields filled out on the current node and not previous one. So, I wrote custom PHP that allows me to pull business title from the parent node via usernode and nodefamily functions by current loaded user. It works great, but I'd rather like you wouldn't want to be limited by it.
Nodeprofile
Maybe I'm missing something, but is there some reason you're not using nodeprofile for this? That's what it's designed for. Putting fields onto usernode is problematic because once you do, you're stuck. Changing content types is not for the faint of heart. If you use nodeprofile, you're just using a regular node type and could switch to bio or any future module without losing your content if you decide to drop usernode some day.
Michelle
Intereting topic
I was wondering about this myself. I think doing 2) first is necessary and then email people. Just like what Gemini said.
The point about usernodes is an interesting one. I am using nodeprofile, which is probably very similar. So I am going to have the same problem as you Gemini. I see you point Michelle about this not being a good idea. However, I do think asking all of the directory listing info as the user signs up is the best idea.
I guess the alternative is using pageroute to create a sign up process where the user enters the directory info as a new node as soon as they sign up?
--
BeFused - Drupal tutorials | Twitter @blairwadman
Entries at signup
I'm curious about putting the directory entry at signup... Do none of you have users who aren't entering businesses? Or that are entering more than one?
Michelle
My non-Drupal directory has
My non-Drupal directory has members that submit multiple businesses... in this case most of them are SEOs who submit their clients. I don't really like this approach, but this is the reality, - a lot of businesses hire people to do this kind of submissions for them. My other project, I'm working on right now, is a niche directory which I would like to have a social status as well... this requires each member to represent themselves and not multiple businesses otherwise it will be a mess.
Authenticating business owners
An important part of allowing users to claim the business listing is making sure they are the legitimate business owner. Without that, anyone can claim a listing and edit it.
I'm not sure what the best approach is for this.
--
BeFused - Drupal tutorials | Twitter @blairwadman
I just got an idea... Let's
I just got an idea...
Let's say we harvested different businesses' information and actually created their profiles ourselves (well, basic or as much as we could enter) - then we only need to send them an email that would act in a similar way to "forgot my password" type of deal, where it gives you a link, so they could re-generate their password or something along those lines. May be it would automatically generate a new password and include it along with their user name in the email. This way you can create all those profiles with their unique user names but even with the same password that only you know... at the same way you don't tell anyone the generic password you used to create those profiles in first place and only their owners can regenerate passwords since you sending emails to the addresses on their account you crated.
Does it make sense?
P.S. sorry for my English... it's my third language :)lol
makes perfect sense
yeah that could work. That is actually quite a brilliant way around it. Any flaws?
I think when we create the accounts for these businesses, we would need to use our own email address, or else the business would get an email confirming the registration. And then, before we send them the email to request their password, we change the email to their email address.
--
BeFused - Drupal tutorials | Twitter @blairwadman
Emails
When you create an account as an admn, notifying the user is an option. So not a problem using their emails as long as you don't have anything else on your system auto sending emails to users and as long as you don't enable their contact tab by default.
Michelle
something along those lines
something along those lines :) Or, you can have a copy of your site running on a local WAMP machine that doesn't send out emails ;) This way you just copy your database to a live server without changing emails. I have WAMP running on my local machine as development server and I set it not to send out any emails... actually it's a pain to do otherwise from a local workstation :)hehe
Just thought I'd drop by
Just thought I'd drop by with my 2cents.
I agree that until you have critical mass, you will need to list the businesses yourselves.
I suggest you email or phone potential businesses and tell them what you're doing. I think that's only polite if you'll be putting their info on the internet, and TBH I'd be a bit disconcerted to find my business details on a website I'd never heard of. They won't mind the free promotion, and you'll be promoting your site and likely get traffic from people checking out their profiles and then browsing the other listings.
Secondly I use a module called authorship, which enables you to change the author of a node. I create the business profile first, with my uid as the author. Then I create the user, and set the "notify" so that they get the welcome message and their password. As soon as I've done that I update the business profile to show the new user I've created as owning the node, so they can edit it however they want (I allow the content type to show up on their profile page). It's a fairly manual process, I'd like to streamline it, but it works.
I'm not sure how this would work with userprofiles (usernodes - I thought this was a module for limiting the number of nodes per user????), but perhaps there is a similar approach that could be used.
Anyway, just more ideas to throw into the mix.
Cheers,
--
tys
BLUE MOUNTAINS health & harmony
www.health-harmony.com.au
building an alternative health & spirituality community in the Blue Mountains
tys
Tyswan
BLUE MOUNTAINS health & harmony
www.health-harmony.com.au
building an alternative health & spirituality community in the Blue Mountains
Notifying
I do plan on notifying them because I want to encourage businesses to maintain their own listing and make less work for me. But I never really thought about it in terms of politeness... If I had a business, I wouldn't care if it got put into a directory as long as the directory wasn't on a site I found objectible (like a porn site or something) and as long as I wasn't being charged for it. Curious what other people think...
I haven't seen the authorship module so maybe this is a dumb question, but why do you need a module to change the author? Why not just edit the node and change it?
Michelle
Mass import
I'm in the planning stage of a business directory project, where the plan is to import a database of local businesses that we have collected. Has anyone attempted to mass import like this before?
Kirk, I haven't imported
Kirk,
I haven't imported large chunks of data yet, but I built a module for my company needs to import leads from an email box directly into Drupal based intranet site as nodes, based on this example http://groups.drupal.org/node/2197. I also will be moving my directory to Drupal and I'll probably go the same route since it's not very complicated.
Importing
I used the node import module to bring in about 50 parks that I had exported to CSV from an Excel file and it worked great. It even works with Location to geocode them. :)
Michelle
The setup...
I'm actually getting ready to start creating a business directory for my community site as well, and while I understand most of the logic, I'm not sure how you are currently implementing it.
Do you guys just simply have a cck content type (we'll call it "business" for this example), that only site admins have permission to create? who is it available to?
Also, once you create numerous businesses and want these businesses to maintain their listing, how do you turn their "business" content type over to their manually created username?
Is this how you would accomplish it?
- Create a new role ("business owner")
- Allow the role to "edit their own business owner" content type
- An admin creates the business a username
- Assign them to the "business owner" role
- Notify them of newly created account
- Manually change authorship of the "business" cck content type to the created user account
This discussion is rather interesting and I'd hate to start down the wrong path, only to have to recreate everything again, later down the road.
Thx,
:cD
subscribe
link
what I did
I built the directory and then spent $2 for a listing of businesses in a similar to field to the one I am marketing my business directory to. I have also gone through the phone book and inputed some but not all of the businesses in the field.
Gordon
BuyThatLocally.com Drive Less Buy More | <a href="http://www.ethosumer.com'>Ethosumer: For The Socially Conscious Consumer</>
State Directory using CCK,
State Directory using CCK, Taxonomy Context and Views. - http://justkansas.com
I am still working on it but its coming along. One thing I want to do is to have a paying membership that you may add a logo and 4 additional links based on the role. Not sure how to make those fields visible based on the authors role.
Nice
I like the looks of your theme. Clean and simple. Now comes the hard part... Adding all the entries. Still working on that myself. :)
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Nice Job!
I'm liking it. I am wondering how are you linking the business name? I am trying to set up something similar for a community newspaper at www.bethanybeachnews.com. I have a business directory A-Z list up, but we want to link the title field to link to websites, but I cannot get it to do that. Any ideas, or links to helpful how-to's or articles would be great! Thanks!
Tutorial?
I think that http://justkansas.com looks very good and I really like that you can sort businesses by type and location.
Can businesses sign up and input the information themselves, or did you have to input all their information?
Could you post a brief tutorial on how you created justkansas.com? I am trying to add a free business directory for veteran owned businesses that can be sorted by business type and location, and yours is the only directory I've found so far that can do that.
Getting information for your directory
Michelle, you asked about getting information for your directory, and talked about using the phone book, but to get business listings, I usually use the Chamber of Commerce, and the city/county/state business license office, as well as Federal rosters of certain specialties/categories, for example minority/women/disabled/veteran owned businesses. They usually have a .csv or excel file that you could import with the node import module.
As a matter of fact, at http://www.lacrossechamber.com/ the Chamber of Commerce has an online Membership Directory of more than 850 members in your area. Their website says to contact them for more information about an enhanced membership listing (color background, logo) that is probably in .csv or excel format.
It's not :(
They sell printed labels for $60 which doesn't do me a lot of good. I've made some attempts at scraping the info but the way they have the site set up makes it beyond my skills. I'll check into your other ideas, thanks.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Chamber Membership Directory - Complete listing of all member
At http://www.lacrossechamber.com/publicat.htm they list a Chamber Membership Directory - Complete listing of all member businesses and organizations including contacts, addresses, phone/fax numbers, and a brief description of services provided for $25.00 .
Scan it, use OCR (Optial Character Recognition included in Office) to convert scanned doc to Word, then convert Word to Excel. Sort/Reorganize and upload into database. Saves tonnes of time typing. :)
...
Heh, I didn't even notice they had that. They didn't mention it when I talked to them, either.
At any rate, I actually got fairly far saving all the pages as text and stripping the HTML out and have it somewhat cleaned up in Excel. I never got it finished and kept hoping there was an easier way than continuing the clean up. But I think finishing the clean up is the best option at this point.
Thanks,
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region