Search Terms - Update

The site was uploaded on Saturday for final testing. It will be down for a short time today as we are moving it to it's own server.

The search lists that are completed are:

Airports in the UK - in the Travel Search Page
Police Stations in England - in the Public Search Page
Schools in England - in the Schools Search Page

We do know of a couple of Airports that have slipped through and they will be added once the site is transferred.
Half of the Train Stations are listed - we decided to list Scotland and Wales as well which put us past our deadline.
Coming soon will be dispensaries and chemists. The list is ready but we are manually formatting it to make the results look better.
The search can be accessed by clicking on the Bookmark Search at the top of the menu. The front page design is being finalised at the moment.

How to get everything on one page

Way back when I first had this idea I wanted all of the information on one page. Now I had six search pages I really had to work on an elegant solution.

One of the major design features of the site is that there is no visible search box. If you need to find something you just click on the Bookmark-Local hand and it will take you to the search page. Select the type of information you are looking for, schools if it is to do with education for example and the correct search page will drop into site. By limiting the number of results per page this search will easily fit on a smart phone screen.

We have 3 pages active at the moment and more coming online soon.

Locator software or how to find stuff

As this blog was the last thing on my mind I've had to write a few to catch up. In February I was looking for locator software - find your nearest store type stuff. There is always a lot of free software online but having invested so much time and money I wanted something that worked. More expense but a really adaptable piece of software. Except, it wasn't designed for the UK. I have had more support tickets for this than everything else put together. It had to be virtually re-written as there were so many differences in how we collate information here. Finally, after several weeks it was working. It uses a database. I'll say that one more time, it uses a database.

My techs response to 200,000 locations and 1,700,000 post codes went along these lines. "That's 3 billion calculations" he said "slow, it will probably stop!" My elegant solution? It now uses 6 databases but could well end up with more.

Post Codes

There is something to be said for our postal service. Sometimes knocked, we run ecommerce sites and use the Royal Mail daily. They are fantastic. But have you ever wondered about post codes?

In the USA they use zip codes. A 5 digit number of which there are around 42,000 of them. In Canada, strangely, they have 800,000! Here in little old UK we just use 1,700,000 of them. Wait a minute, did you say one million, seven hundred thousand of them? I'm starting to go grey. No wonder they know where to put the letters.

So, why do I need post codes? You can find people and places using parts of the address but to get driving directions from google you need a post code. If I needed post codes then I needed a database to put them in...

One year on. December 2011

So, just one year after my first idea I found myself with lots of almost finished information on most of the counties of England. I'd decided early on to concentrate on England first. The sheer amount of information was awesome. My next worry was designing the site.

Here I had a stroke of luck. A client had wanted a new design for his charity. To test the design I used it for a fashion boutique. It was amazing. Not only did it look great, it worked beautifully on mobile phones as well. I decided to use this as the basis of my own site. So began six months of redesigning to get it right. Picture the most amount of information you can fit on a computer screen then cut the screen in half and fit the same amount on one half. That's what you need to do to fit a mobile phone. Lose a bit more to put the menu down the side and still keep it all legible.

And while this was going on we kept collecting information...

From small beginnings come huge bills

My initial design had 20 categories slickly interchanging on the same page. I squeezed all of the libraries in, all of the hospitals then....

How many doctors??? The design fell apart. 220 doctors in one county alone. I'd spent a month collating all of these addresses only to find out it would take me the rest of my life to finish it. So, two problems, the site isn't big enough and I need more staff.

I decided to concentrate first on gathering the information I needed and employed full time staff to collect it. The design of the site would have to wait but the ideas were coming thick and fast...

Where did the name come from

The searches that had always proved the most difficult were when you needed the local hardware store or plumber. Large companies are good at getting their information out but smaller ones sometimes, even in this day and age, don't even have a web presence. I was formulating the idea that what was needed was a local directory giving contact details for all the types of services you might need. Once you'd found a page that gave you that, you'd bookmark it. Hence - bookmark local.

What happened next...

I started looking at other information sites. Some of them were very good but a bit dated. Some had good information under certain headings and then nothing under others. One I found that was advertising everything under the sun had just 3 items! Not 3 headings, just 3 items. I decided that it was time to look at the issue.

December 2010 and I have some free time. I begin designing the site. Nice charcoal background with deep orange. Some really clever java script to change content. I wanted everything to happen on one page - no looking through menus. The result was spectacular and every person who saw it loved it. I went one stage further. Sub-domains would allow me to have a dedicated site for every county. I started looking at what was needed.

Where the idea came from...

Searching the web for information one day I was struck by the fact that much as I adored google, the content they found could be less than adequate. Not google's fault of course. I wanted some local information and as I trawled through half a dozen sites I realised it was probably taking me as long as looking through the telephone directories and newspapers had done years before. Even when I found the information I wanted, I had probably seen lots of it on several different sites.

There were other problems as well. I'd come across sites offering me vast amounts of information only to find that they were very limited and usually put together just to show some adverts. Some sites even had no content at all or were so out of date that had they been on a shelf they would have been covered in cob webs.

I design web sites. I've done some quirky ones and simple ones and odd ones but, they all work. I mean, you don't need a degree to use them and it's always easy to navigate yourself around. I also have my own hosting company. So, I'm thinking, it's not going to cost me anything to knock something up....