So, You want to use the business directory but can't quite get the hang of it.  Hopefully we can shed some light on the subject and make it easier to navigate.

Introduction

The business directory is a collection of "listings" for businesses in the area, each contributed by one of our BigTreesTech members.  Each listing has a number of information "fields", some of which are mandatory, and some of which are not. One of the mandatory fields is "Category" which is supposed to be an indicator as to the type of business associated with a particular listing.  Each listing can be associated with multiple categories.  For example, a hardware store might be associated with both a construction as well as a shopping category.

In the rest of this article we'll cover searching, adding new listings, and adding review comments and star ratings.

I'd like to get you're feedback on some things regarding this site and its direction in the future.  My original idea had been to have several elements of the site where you, the community, would contribute your knowledge and time to add content to the site.  Examples so far include the Calendar of Events, and the Business Directory.  I had more content, along similar lines in store for the future, like a local activities directory.  However, this does not seem to have worked out so well.  For reasons I'm not willing to guess at, there has not been much participation by members in making contributions to these areas of the site.  Don't get me wrong, we have had some great contributions, but it's been mostly by a very small number of members (still much appreciated!).

So, what I'm asking for is your ideas... I'm going to leave this open ended but the kind of things I'm looking for are:

• Why haven't member contributed content areas worked out very well so far?
• What could be done differently / better?
• Should we abandon the member-contributed content model?
• Any other ideas that you might have.

Please add your comments to this forum thread.
Thanks,

joe