Easter update

Some exciting new features and developments going on right now for the site.

Firstly, what I’ve termed Phase 3 is now up and running. Phase 2 was rather dull so please don’t ask about it. Phase 3 is a project that will add granularity to businesses and allow them to be subcategorised. Why? Well if you’re searching for a restaurant in a town in the UK, it’s pretty likely you’re not looking for any old restaurant, you might be looking for a Thai restaurant or a Indian restaurant. With Phase 3, these extra bits of information are going to be in the directory. And perhaps more importantly, Phase 3 will see the addition of multiple new categories. Look out for Home Improvement, Health and Beauty and Web Services and many more in the near future!

Secondly, on my short term list of things to do are several more general site wide improvements:

1) Moving the ‘add a venue’ link from the rather obscure bottom of the page to the red title bar at the top complete with graphic. We receive many many requests asking us how to add a venue each day, quite clearly the current link is not obvious.

2) I’m going to add parking data to the site. I do think train stations are useful and that’s why they are there, and as such I intend to fully keep that data but quite clearly if people are going shopping or visiting an accountant etc, they probably want to know where to park their car. I’m collecting some data at the moment from 4 different sources and trying to carefully verify the integrity of the data. I then need to parse the data into the index with a bit of work but I think this will be worth the effort.

3) The search bar. The database search will be wider so that more results are captured. Although exact match searches is not what coded at the moment, the search function does have narrow parameters that mean many places that should be returned for a search are not.

4) Behind the scenes stuff: some fairly major developments to the site’s back end scripts that should improve database entry time for new places and update times for snippets of updated information.

Please – as always, feedback is useful for me and indeed very welcome.