What makes a good directory?

I noticed varying levels of web sites listed, I thought you may be interested to know of the my thoughts from the perspective of someone listing with a directory.

1. First thing is.. how easy is it to find the category you want to list in from the home page, some dirs are so flippin confusing that you need a degree in rocket science just to navigate to the right place to list, usually the sites that are listed well at first glance are best for me. I don’t mind clicking to sub categories but the ones easiest are usually listed alphabetically.. or at least well orientated.

2. The web site gains points for looking clean and not too fussy or messy, too much advertising and distractions on the home page just clutter everything up and make it hard to find where to submit, if it’s not easy I’m onto the next dir.

3. Make the submission button easily visible, the best way to submit seems to be.. a) without having to navigate to the category first, make the submit/add url button visible on the nav bar or alike (then allow me to choose my desired category from a drop down menu (multiple drop down menus are best but they should be the first thing you do, so that I don’t fill in all my info then realise when I choose the drop down categories I lose the data I just typed) b) If you search your category first, make the add url button visible at the nav bar or bottom (some sites seem to take you different places whether you click on add url at nav bar or bottom of page which is really confusing).

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