Nice Directory Designs

[David]

I'd love to see someone come up with a really beautiful design. Here are a few non-phpld directories that look quite nice:

1. AbiLogic - http://www.abilogic.com
2. Ajdee - http://www.ajdee.com
3. Allestra - http://www.allestra.com
4. Linkopedia - http://www.linkopedia.com

Do you know of some other nice ones that people could use to model their phpld after?

[Anonymous]

OK, this is where i get really confused. in the world of directories, nice designs means something entirely different to the rest of the web world. Of the sites in the list above, in my book only one warrants the accolade nice design - allestra - at least they have made some effort beyond tweaking the stylesheet and adding a funky logo to make their home page look just a little bit different to the thousands of other link directories in webland.

Personally, no site can ever be described as having a nice desig if it looks identical to countless other sites, with a very basic interface and the limit on customisation put on background colour and font style. For a link directory to stand out in my memory, it must look something different to dmoz, yahoo directory or the "others".

To those reading this thread who think that they should build their directory to look like the ones in the list, this serves a purpose which is clean and intuitive customer interface. It does not, however tick the box of original, distinct or even "nice" design.

Thats my opinion of course, and doubtless there are many who would disagree, but to put it into context, if you were to launch an auction site that looked identical to ebay, your site would have NO brand image and whilst your customers may know exactly how to use the site, they would probably have great difficulty in finding it again - no memorability with a vanilla template. To succeed when you have thousands to millions of direct competitors, yes you do need a funky logo graphic, but you also need a distinctive and unique appearance which will help your customer base to remember YOUR site, not your competitions. Even worse, they could end up at your competitor's site and think that their site, IS yours.

Just a thought to throw into the mixer.....

[Anonymous]

Oh, and whilst I'm ranting, why does EVERYBODY insist on using the dmoz directory structure? At least call the categories something alittle different - i.e instead of shopping, try e-commerce or online stores or something. Just another little bug bear.....

[minstrel]

I think because people who shop online search for certain terms with a higher frequency than others. There are services like overture which will provide these data for you.

[Anonymous]

Content visible to registered users only.

If you make a small directory that is no problem, but try maintaining a large directory with a custom category structure.

[Anonymous]

Hi all. I just found the site and share a lot of interest in web directories as I'm the developer of one myself.

We use a custom directory subject structure derived from the Dewey Decimal System as the project was initiated in the National Library of Wales and supported by the British Library. However over the past 3 years the focus has changes somerwhat and we're looking into other posible structures to use as an alternative or an optional view on the data.

I'm currently redeveloping the entire site in it's 3rd incarnation and have for the most part, developed a new tree based structure onto which other structures (DMOZ, Dewey, Folksonomy) can be mapped.

We are a full time team of 3 (1 developer and 2 research discovery/marketting/content editors), and maintaining a large directory is a full time job. Especially when it needs to be bi-lingual. I thought about importing DMOZ RDF structure and maintaining a bi-lingual version but no decision has been made yet.

Just thought I'd say hi and tell you why we at least, do things our way. I'll be keeping a close eye on here from now on. Nice to meet you :)

[Surfr]

Doh. Thought I was logged on. The above post is from me :)