Shopping Directories

Shopping for the Cheapest Deals on the Web

Shopping on the Web has become easier to do over the past years. As more online stores open up every week, competition gets fierce. This causes merchants to resort to more competitive pricing. Whatever product you are looking for, there is usually hundreds to thousands of options of where to buy online. The great number of shoppers online has also spurred something called shopping directories, which let you search through different stores to find the product you need without having to visit multiple stores. While shopping online, you can also read multiple unbiased reviews from multiple consumers who have bought and used the products.

Convienence and Availability

Every week, a bunch of new online stores open. This makes shopping online easier than ever. The Internet has become a virtually endless resource for shoppers to find exactly what they need conveniently in the comfort of their own homes. More and more shoppers are deciding to buy online as opposed to going to the store. Many find this more convienent than having to drive to a store. It is also easier to browse different products between online stores for the best prices. Finding the product you're looking for requires almost no effort. Sometimes the product finds you, through advertisements.

Cheaper Prices

Every week, fierce competitors lower prices on products, or resort to other tactics like promoting and marketing, and a wide range of other strategies to keep customers coming to their store. This makes it better for you, the shopper. Shoppers are also more likely to find better deals at online stores because they do not have to worry about having a physical shop and all the costs that come with it. This helps give online stores the ability to offer better prices yet still keep a reasonable profit margin.

Shopping Directories make Online Shopping even more Efficient

Shopping directories have become a popular resource, as they let shoppers browse through multiple store products all from one site. This cuts down on even more time spent shopping through various stores by letting shoppers 1) search through multiple stores for an item and 2) search for multiple types of items from multiple stores. This makes online shopping much more efficient whether you are looking for only 1 type of item or multiple items from different categories. This is an advantage to the shoppers and online stores because it centralizes the process of shopping to make it easier for shoppers to find sellers that meet their needs, as well as helps sellers reach buyers outside of their site.

Find out more about a product before you decide to buy

There is just a massive resource of reviews for all types of products online. You can read multiple reviews from other consumers who have bought a product to help aide you in deciding which product, brand, and/or variation of the product you wish to buy. Some online stores even give shoppers the ability to write reviews about a product after they have bought it to help inform future shoppers. This can help immensely when trying to choose the perfect product to fit your needs, as you see what other people have to say about their experiences with a product, as well as quality and value.

Online Shopping has been a growing trend for years

Over the past years, internet shopping has been growing at an incredible rate. We always hear about how much Internet Retail sales figures are multiplying every year. That is because online shopping has so many advantages and great deals that more and more people realize it and opt to buy certain products online where they see fit. With more online stores opening every week, more shopppers deciding to make purchases online, the competitive pricing between online stores, and vast resources to help people better shop like Shopping Directories and product reviews, its no wonder more and more people are making more purchases online.

Interactive Digital Directories

Why digital directories?

Directories aim to provide a source of comprehensive information for businesses, public services and organisations. Digital directories are an ideal solution for those organisations that require members listings and information to remain current.

Through the integration of rich digital media, directories provide the opportunity to relay a powerful message and ensure that your readers can receive and send information to network and interact.

Digital directories also allow you to increase your readership with effortless global distribution and reach new readers with a 50% lower cost per acquisition compared to your printed directories. Through the use of live email and web addresses enables direct instant access to each company listed within the directory.

Why EBS digital media?

• You maintain full control with in-house production, using our simple online, on-demand publishing application. Or alternatively, the EBS Bureau Service will do it for you!
• The EBS Digital Rights Management system allows for the protection of subscription to directories. Upload subscription lists and administer access rules.
• Using an extract from the directory, you can build an invaluable opt-in email database of interested customers, with our email collection facility.
• Fully search engine optimized for greater exposure. e.g. Customers on Google can search and find specific items within the directory.
• All-inclusive price per page, including hosting and live web and email address links made live at no extra cost.
• Unique razor sharp vector text and infinite zoom allows easy reading of smaller fonts and an accessible text-only version is available, that integrates with screen readers for the blind and partially sighted.
• Full statistics package to measure effectiveness, such as pages viewed and links clicked.
• Contextual archive search which allows users to search past and present directories, with all search results highlighted for easy location.

Blog directory

A blog directory is a taxonomic hierarchical listing of blogs. There are many blog directories in existence, and often the blog directory is associated with a social networking or community site. Often blogs will include themselves in a blog directory when they are starting out to try to gain traffic: either via search engine rankings or traffic from the blog directory.

Types of blog directories

Blog directories can be classified in many different ways, including: cost of adding a blog and method of maintaining

The cost of adding falls into three categories:

1. Paid submission directories
2. Free submission directories with link back requirements
3. Free submission directories with no link back requirements
4. Select inclusion directories that do not accept submissions

The method of editing or maintaining a directory has the following categories:

1. No editing performed (theoretically possible)
2. Staff edited
3. Community edited

An additional element that differentiates one blog directory from another is the presence of or lack of social networking and community elements (such as discussion forums, friend lists, etc.)

Article Directory

Thoughts on Article Directory Oddities


If you publish articles to promote your site, you have probably noticed the directories evolve. Some things are just odd, but others are not good developments.

Thoughts on Article Directory Oddities

Every major article directory seems to have a life of its own. They can be an excellent platform for publishing articles to promote your site and then make some change or take some action that makes you groan. Here are some oddities you may or may not know on the directories.

Article City is one of the older directories on the web. It is an old school article submission site that really produces links. There are, however, a couple of odd things about it. First, the categories you can submit under are very limited, which can be frustrating. More bizarre, however, is the fact the entire site comes to a halt during the summer. From roughly June through August, nobody appears to be working. No new articles are published on the site. Then in September, the site comes alive again. Odd, but true.

Ezine Articles is undisputedly the biggest article directory on the web. It is rated as the 552nd most popular site on the web by Alexa. Alexa is admittedly an inaccurate tool, but it is still an impressive ranking. Ezine Articles had a tremendous format, but suddenly decided to change it in early 2006. It added all types of features. Some I like such as the multiple author byline possibilities, but others are a waste. Overall, I can’t decide if I like it or not, but one thing that definitely is a negative is the internal submission area is slow and sometimes freezes up. Still, this is the number one directory if you are going to use articles to pump your site. In fact, you can find this article there. Hopefully!

Article Alley – may you rest in peace. Once upon a time, this was my favorite article directory. It was simple, clean and generated links like mad. The site hasn’t really changed much, but it must have been sold to a new owner. The site is extremely slow when it comes to loading pages and often times out. Submitted articles are more often than not disregarded and just sit in limbo. You might think my articles just stink, but I am actually one of the top authors on the site by views and number of articles published. I no longer submit to Article Alley, a sad day indeed.

Another site that has fallen apart is Isnare. In truth, the site is fine and runs just the way it used to. The issues has to do with profit. The owners of Isnare figured out they could make more money offering an article submission service than they could with the directory site. They now seem to spend most of their time on that. I have a sneaking suspicion there is one poor soul sitting their approving articles. Since they get thousands a day, not much gets published. Currently, they seem to be two to three months behind. Much like Article Alley, I no longer submit to Isnare.

At the end of the day, everyone has a favorite article submission site. As long as they are producing for you, who can complain? Still, I will miss Article Alley.

Designing Your Website's Directory

Designing Your Website's Directory Structure

Any kid, and their grandmother too, can make a webpage. There are many "wysiwyg" webpage design applications that let you create a webpage as easy as typing text. But only a few people can create a WEBSITE. The stumbling block is knowing how to link webpages together to form a website. I have seen many websites that consist of a single webpage - about a mile long!

The first problem is that websites are contained in virtual directories. You know that your webpages can be found at yourdomain.com, but the actual path to yourdomain.com on the web server may be known only by the system administrator. And the system administrator can move your website to a different folder, or even a different computer, without changing its virtual address.

The second problem is that most people don't know how to write a relative link. Relative links have the advantage that you don't need to know the path to the webpage that you want to link to, you only need to know where it is "relative" to the webpage containing the link.

Designing Your Directory Structure

The first step to implementing a website is to design the directory structure. Let's design a directory structure for a simple download website. The website consists primarily of articles and digital material that visitors can download. You could just dump everything at the top level of the website. Good luck maintaining that website!

To keep the files organized, you need to create sub-directories (folders) on the website. Even though the website consists only of articles and digital downloads, you need five sub-directories, as described below.

• articles
• downloads
• general
• common
• cgi-bin

You understand what the "articles" and "downloads" sub-directories are for, but what are the other three sub-directories for? It's standard practice to provide certain features on your website, as listed below.

• About
• Contact
• FAQ
• Privacy Policy
• Search
• Sitemap
• User Agreement

Each of these features requires a webpage. Instead of dumping the webpages at the top level of the website, or mixing them in with articles or downloads, let's put them together in a folder named "general" (I'm sure you can think of a better name).

All of your webpages use certain things in common, for example, your logo graphic. If your web server provides SSI (Server Side Includes) all your webpages can share a common header file and a common footer file. You might also define all your website's styles in a common style sheet. Let's put all of these files in a folder named "common".

Your contact page might use an email form. If your server provides server-side scripts, you would place the email form script in a folder named "cgi-bin". Cgi-bin stands for "Common Gateway Interface - Binary". Few people use CGI any more, and those that do don't use binary files, but the folder name has stuck as a traditional place to store scripts. Almost all websites come with a preconfigured cgi-bin folder, and the website may be configured so that the cgi-bin folder is the only folder with rights to run scripts.

I would also recommend that you create certain sub-directories for some of the above mentioned directories. Most web pages contain images. You could dump all the images in the same folder with the webpages, but when you get more than about 50 files in a folder, it becomes difficult to maintain. You should create an "images" sub-directory in the articles, downloads, and general directories. The downloads directory should also have a "files" sub-directory to store the downloads.

This arangement of directories and sub-directories will provide good file organization for the example website. Understanding my reasoning for this directory structure should help you to design a directory structure for the website you have in mind.

Default Page Configuration

Every website has at least one default webpage configured (also called the "home" page). The default webpage is the webpage that is returned when the user enters or clicks on a link containing only the domain name, without a specific file name. On a Unix or Linux web server, the default webpage will usually be "index.htm". On a Windows web server (IIS), the default page will usually be "default.asp".

The website administrator, or if your webhost provides the required "control panel" feature, you can actually configure any page to be the default page. If your web server has more than one default page configured, I would recommend removing all but the default page that you intend to use.

Now, let's assume that all of your webpages need to link to an image file named "logo.gif" stored in the "common" folder. The relative link on your default webpage would be as shown below.

"common/logo.gif"

The website file manager interprets this as "look in the folder named common for the file named logo.gif".

However, the link on any webpage contained in one of the sub-directories would be as shown below.

"../common/logo.gif"

The website file manager interprets this as "go up one level, then look down in the folder named common for the file named logo.gif".

This difference in the link may not be a problem unless you use SSI or ASP (Active Server Pages) to build your webpages from a common header file and a common footer file. Then you need a different link in the common file depending upon whether the page linked to the common file is the default webpage (where you would use common/filename) or a webpage contained in a sub-directory (where you would use ../common/filename). There are several ways to solve this problem.

1. If your website has a server-side scripting engine like ASP or PHP and you know how to program, you could implement code that selects the proper link.

2. You could use the complete path, including the domain name, on all pages. This will cause problems if you ever have to move your website to a different web host (Until all the dns servers across the planet have been updated).

3. You could put your home page in a sub-directory, for example "common", and make your default page into a re-direct to your home page. Then you would use "../common/filename" for all links. The following meta tag, placed the head section of your default webpage, will immediately redirect the users browser to your real home page.

meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0,url= "http://yourdomain.com/common/homepage.htm"

In this article, I showed you how to design a directory structure for your website and how to create relative links to link all your webpages together to form a website. Website visitors don't like to do a lot of scrolling, so try to keep your webpages to only two or three screens high. Please, no more websites that consist of only one mile long webpage!

Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.

ZIP Code Directory

Avoid wasted postage and ensure timely receipt of all your outbound mail and overnight deliveries.

The National Information Data Center (NIDC) has published the National ZIP Code® Directory for over 30 years. Now, it’s the only hard-copy ZIP Code® directory available. Using data licensed directly from the USPS, our two-volume set features the most complete, up-to-date ZIP information available. You can look up U.S. streets in large cities and post offices by ZIP Code®, 3-Digit Service Area, and even national area code listings for the special price of $79.95/set.

The 2-volume 2009 ZIP Code® Directory set includes:

* More than 45,000 updated ZIP Codes®, covering 125 million addresses, licensed directly from the United States Postal Service.

* Easy-to-reference ZIP Code® look-up. You can search by city, state, and street to avoid additional
mail and overnight charges.

* Completely updated U.S. Telephone Listing. You will save time and money on directory assistance fees with this easy-to-use guide.

Now includes newly updated easy to read individual 3-Digit U.S State Maps. The 8.5 x 11 map located after the each state information page shows every 3-digit ZIP Code® in the area.

Just Added! Official US Census Bureau State and County Demographic and Economic Profiles. Now you can get quick, easy access to facts about people, business, and geography for the states that you do business in and how it compares to the overall US population.

Directory Assistance

The PresbyKirk Library belongs to the age of instant communications and cyberspace. To some it seemed like the telephone was challenge enough. However, even then everyone maintained his or her own personal book of address and phone numbers in addition to the one issued by the telephone company. Well, modern communications have not entirely solved that one for us. Now we need to remember not only addresses and telephone numbers, but cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses and the URL for our favourite web sites as well. Admittedly, the various technology devices in our world help us to store and retrieve all this information. But if your life is like most other people's you spend a considerable amount of time just hunting for all this various address information.

The PresbyKirk Library proposes to help you with at least some parts of this task. We have gathered together a collection of Internet directories to help you locate telephone numbers, postal address information (including postal codes), and those ever changing e-mail addresses. We even try to indicate the strengths and limitations of the various directories listed. While we cannot guarantee you success in your searches we can at least offer some tools that may help.

Internet Directories
Canada 411. A directory of Canadian telephone numbers.
Who Where? A good place to locate telephone, e-mail & address information.
Reverse Phone Directory. Locate a name and address from a telephone number.
Telephone Directories on the Web. Access to various international telephone directories.
Switchboard The Internet Directory.
Canada Post Information about postal codes and current postal rates too.

PresbyKirk's own "Yellow Pages for Christian Organizations"

In addition to the above collection of Internet Directories we have compiled for you our own select list of web site addresses (URLs) for a number of local and national Christian organizations. We call this our "Yellow Pages for Christian Organizations" and although it has never been published anywhere but here we have designed a neat cover for our Directory. We have tried whenever possible to provide the address for the Canadian web site of the organization concerned.

Alpha Canada
Anglican Book Centre, Toronto
Anglican Journal
APCE Association of Presbyterian Church Educators
The Back to God Hour A ministry of the Christian Reformed Church
Camp Kintail Camp operated by the Synod of Southwestern Ontario of the PCC
Campus Crusade For Christ
Canadian Association for Pastoral Practice and Education (CAPPE)
Canadian Bible Society
Canadian Council of Churches
Canadian Foodgrains Bank
Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation
Canadian Evangelical Theological Association
Canadian Theological Society
Child Evangelism Fellowship of Canada
Chosen People Ministries
Compassion Society A program in Burlington, Ontario.
Christian Blind Mission International
Christian Children's Fund of Canada
Christian Copyright Licensing International
Christian Labour Association of Canada
Christian Week
Church Growth Resources, Inc.
Citizens for Public Justice
Crieff Hills Community (PCC conference facility)
The Elder's Institute A program of St. Andrew's Hall
Evangel Hall
Evangelical Fellowship of Canada
The Free Methodist Church in Canada
Galcom International
The Gideon Society
Habitat For Humanity
Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto
International Bible Society
Interserve Canada
Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada
Jews for Jesus
John Milton Society for the Blind
Moveable Feast Resources Glen Soderholm's ministry to encourage vibrant worship.
Knox College, Toronto.
The Leprosy Mission Canada
Living Rock Ministries Hamilton, Ontario
McMaster Divinity College
Mennonite Central Committee
Mission Aviation Fellowship of Canada
Mothers Who Care
National Presbyterian Museum of the Presbyterian Church in Canada
Navigators of Canada
Ontario Pioneer Camp (IVCF)
Pioneer Clubs of Canada
Presbyterian College, Montreal
Prison Fellowship Canada
Project Ploughshares
Promise Keepers
Reachout Ministries Dr. Larry Brice
Redeemer University College, Hamilton, Ont.
The Reformed Theology Source
Regent College, Vancouver.
Renewal Fellowship Within the Presbyterian Church in Canada
St. Andrew's Hall, Vancouver, B.C.
The Scott Mission
Student Christian Movement Canada
Trinity Western University
Tyndale College and Seminary
The United Church Observer
Urbana Student Mission Convention (IVCF)
Vancouver School of Theology
Vision TV
Walk Thru the Bible Canada
Wesley Urban Ministries
Women's Inter-Church Council of Canada Sponsors of the World Day of Prayer
World Vision
Wycliffe Bible Translators