Hey,
Getting ready to launch a site driven by Links SQL and had a question about what directory arrangement I should pursue. I'm interested in your thoughts for the best way to streamline this in terms of usability and minimizing directory size.
Here's what I want to happen:
Users will post listings (think classifieds) based on their college and the subject the listing pertains to.
Students can then go to each college's directory listing, and be presented with listings by subject category.
So, a student at Ohio State looking for a Chemistry book could go to:
example.com/USA/OH/Ohio_State
and then browse the subject listings and select
example.com/USA/OH/Ohio_State/Chemistry
Each school would have the same broad subjects, about 80 or so (I'm not up for the task of getting every individual subject for each college, at least not yet). Multiply that by about 800 schools and that's about 64000 categories to start.
The only thing that bugs me is the mass duplication of these 80 subject categories or so. I wasn't sure if there was a better way to approach this.
One thought is to not create a category for each subject, but allow the users to select a subject field for each listing. Then when a user visits a specific college in the directory, they will be presented what looks like a typical directory with all the subjects (think 2 or 3 columns), but clicking on each respective subject will simply run some type of search or filter to display only the listings from that institution for that specific subject.
I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on an arrangement I could use.
Robert
http://www.pcprofiles.com
PC Profiles and hardware reviews
Getting ready to launch a site driven by Links SQL and had a question about what directory arrangement I should pursue. I'm interested in your thoughts for the best way to streamline this in terms of usability and minimizing directory size.
Here's what I want to happen:
Users will post listings (think classifieds) based on their college and the subject the listing pertains to.
Students can then go to each college's directory listing, and be presented with listings by subject category.
So, a student at Ohio State looking for a Chemistry book could go to:
example.com/USA/OH/Ohio_State
and then browse the subject listings and select
example.com/USA/OH/Ohio_State/Chemistry
Each school would have the same broad subjects, about 80 or so (I'm not up for the task of getting every individual subject for each college, at least not yet). Multiply that by about 800 schools and that's about 64000 categories to start.
The only thing that bugs me is the mass duplication of these 80 subject categories or so. I wasn't sure if there was a better way to approach this.
One thought is to not create a category for each subject, but allow the users to select a subject field for each listing. Then when a user visits a specific college in the directory, they will be presented what looks like a typical directory with all the subjects (think 2 or 3 columns), but clicking on each respective subject will simply run some type of search or filter to display only the listings from that institution for that specific subject.
I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on an arrangement I could use.
Robert
http://www.pcprofiles.com
PC Profiles and hardware reviews