Sandgate Business Directory Revamped and Improved

We have hosted and updated the Sandgate Business Directory as a free service to our friends and neighbours in Sandgate for over 16 years now. It's hugely well indexed on Google for Sandgate, and we work to keep business profiles up to date and the information useful for locals and visitors alike.

This summer, we've migrated the site from WordPress to the TYPO3 platform. We wanted to refresh the look and feel, and with our customised, easy to deploy and update TYPO3 Website Builder package for businesses, it felt like the right time to test it out directly!

Content is key, but design is important too.

We've ensured each business has their own page, with a sensible url, and tried to make sure each has the sort of content search engines will want to see - descriptions, opening hours, contact details, social media links.

In addition, although the previous version of the site had an events section, we've massively expanded that and use events happening in specific businesses (whether a shop, pub or club) on that profile page too as well as the main directory. This works well for both users (who benefit from more relevant and timely information) but again search engines, who see pages with more frequently updated content: they like that!

An example of that page design is on our listing for Bar 96 (96 Sandgate High Street) with description, social media links, contact details, events and our natty drop-in pin map. In additional the site has various business category pages, for All Businesses, Shop, Leisure, Eat and Drink and Services all showing a sub-set of the businesses in Sandgate, and another version of the drop-in interactive pin map.

And crucially, we've made sure (as we do for every site we build) that the Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO of the site are good. With Lighthouse test scores of between 96 and 100 across all categories (so consistently good to excellent), always more to do, but not bad!

All these features and more are available with our Typo3 Website Builder package. What will you do with yours?