A lot of EdinburghMenus.com was done in a bit of a rush to try and get the site live asap. Now we’ve got time to go back and make things a bit better…

Ok, we know we really should be focusing on some more fundamental features of the site, like making it easier and quicker to add new businesses and menus to the site, but we can’t help but keep tweaking other little bits.

So what’s changed in the last week or so?

• The directory part of the site has been restructured. Now the directory category index shows how many businesses there are for that category in brackets after the link. Once you’re browsing a category in the directory it’s also possible to jump straight to businesses beginning with any letter of the alphabet by clicking the links. Links are disabled for letters that don’t have any businesses starting with that category. Pretty fundamental stuff, we know, but we didn’t get round to doing it earlier!
• New results pagination design. Shamelessly nabbing the design from a couple of our favourite “Web 2.0″ sites, Digg and Flickr, it’s now possible to immediately and easily jump to the next, previous, first, last and adjacent search results whether you’re viewing the directory, search results or reviews.
• New URI structure for businesses. We’ve always been pretty pleased with our clean URI structure. Rather than having long and unmemorable addresses with seemingly random code in them, our URIs are easy to read and hopefully make navigating the site a less confusing experience.
  The URIs for businesses was a little bit rubbish though - rather than using the name of the business to identify the page it used the numeric ID of the business (eg. http://edinburghmenus.com/business/255/). Short, but not very user-friendly. So now businesses have addresses that are just their business name followed by their postcode. Spaces have been replaced with underscores. We’ve also dropped the “business/” bit - it didn’t really make sense - the businesses belong in the “directory” part of the site structure. So the URI for Anima in Stockbridge is now http://edinburghmenus.com/directory/anima_eh35dh/ . This is longer, but better. It should also help our search engine performance. Of course, the old URIs will still work and silently divert to the new address with a 301 redirect.

And that’s about it, I think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 and is filed under development, technical.
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