Split: Categories and Viewing Listing Defaults

Thank you, Guust, we appreciate your response.

I am not sure if I misunderstanding something about this geodirectory program, or not. After reading the forum comments, your responses and others, it seems like this directory is fundamentally based around having listings and places primarily organized around categories that have more and less listings under them …. not based around how most directories are structured – alphabetically. This makes no sense to many of us.

Based on our initial experience with GD being imbedded in our real estate website (www.MiamiWaterfrontExperts.com), as well as what I’m reading from many other the forum comments, here are some follow up responses to your emil, if I can indulge you:

1) For the most part, we’re not interested in listing categories or places by popularity. However, it’s now appearing that this is the primary way to basically organize the categories in your program. Instead, we need to organize them in a fundamental way, i.e. alphabetically … Because that’s how people initially and fundamentally search for things – unless they know to search otherwise. (If someone is searching for a place on our site, they don’t know intuitively if it’s popular or not – only the author or website people creating the directory would know that initially.)

it seems like a fundamental flaw that categories cannot be arranged in alphabetical order. The vast majority of directories I have seen, i.e. phonebook, yellow pages, community directories, etc, have everything listed alphabetically.

Additionally, “Popular “doesn’t necessarily mean to readers how many listings there are in a category. This is confusing. Instead “popular category” could easily be thought to contain the places within the category that people favor or are “popular”, or that many people visit, or the places are favored by more people, etc, – not how many listings are in a category. So, the term “popular” may not be the best descriptive word for that header.

That being said, defaulting to categories being organized by popularity, and readers not understanding that concept, it’s likely readers of the directory would be confused about how to search a list of categories when it appears to be in a “random” order.

2) Regarding listings being placed in order of ID number, if only one listing/place falls within that category, makes no sense most of the time because when people are creating directories, that would mean the creator of the directory would have to know in advance every single category they would ever want to have, and then create these categories in order in advance to always maintain the desired order of categories over time. That’s not realistic. …. Unless it’s possible to change ID numbers over time to reflect any changes and category ordering requirements, this makes no sense either.

In reading the forum comments, number one and two above are big issues.

3) It would seem more logical that ordering categories by ID number would make more sense if we can change the ID numbers to reflect any additions or deletions in the directory categories. However, I looked and could not see how you could change the ID number.

Can we change the ID number, so we can place these categories in the correct order once we started creating categories?

4) Additionally, I’m not sure why the number of listings or places under a category should be the primary basis for fundamentally structuring the categories? I understand this could be an option if that’s what some people want, but that should not be the default option for structuring categories … In particularly when directories are not typically structured based on the number of listings/places within the categories.

5) I understand why someone may want to organize things by popularity and then wanting a way for doing this (which GD provides), but I imagine most people are not organizing by popularity (or at least in the sense that popular means more listings under a category) … It would seem most would be organizing by alphabetizing the categories… which doesn’t appear to be something this directory permits, or at least not easily. This seems baffling to many.

6) Regarding inserting code into our site, to reorder the categories, I’m not sure how we insert code into the site we have, as we are not programmers. Can’t this be done with a widget?

Again, thank you for the interest and response.
Scott