Various new site improvements

Well I hope this will be the last big development push for the site. I’m making a number of improvements which range from minor to significant. Specifically:

1) Improving page loading time. Reducing excess images and replacing with text or css clipart where possible. I want the site to read like a magazine – easy and quick to flick through.

2) Removing “excess” pages. Effectively taking information from thin pages and merging that information with existing pages so that information is more concentrated and more readily available to the website user.

3) Shortening and simplifying page URLs. Short page URLs are easy to remember. http://www.bigreddirectory.com/arzoo-bicester and http://www.bigreddirectory.com/tesco-bicester are ideal URLs as opposed to http://www.bigreddirectory.com/tesco_barrow_in_furness_extra-barrow_in_furness-hindpool_road.

4) Links to official websites for pubs and restaurants. Currently pub landlords can update the listing to insert their official websites but I intend to make this automatic. The BRD bot will scour the web for official websites and insert them into the directory.

5) Improve pub etc duplication detection. My last code update improved this a lot but there is still duplication in the index. Each amenity has an associated longitude and latitude with it which makes duplication detection easier than cross referencing words in addresses and postcodes.

Will keep you up to date with progress!