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Getting Started

Creating a web-based portal is a great way to attract and retain visitors, generate revenue through advertising, offer free advertising for your company / products or simply organise your company / personal information into an organised, searchable directory of information.

The deloittes.NET Directory system provides all the features required to create scalable, robust topic-specific portals. This short guide to getting started hopes to highlight some of the key points you should consider before you begin creating a directory and explains how to create a very basic first directory.

Defining your topic

Before you begin, it's important to determine the topic for your portal. Your portal could cover a whole variety of interest areas such as Yahoo or you could choose to create a more targeted portal specifically aimed at a niche market. Ultimately the choice of topic is your own decision. This could be influenced by personal interest, commercial profitability or out of a need to organise specific information.

Defining categories

Once you have defined a subject and researched other sites based on similar topics, you should have determined the best possible categories for your directory. It helps to visualise the structure of your categories before creating an online version using the deloittes.NET Directory admin pages.

Creating the Directory

To start creating your directory make sure the provided pre-populated database is empty and you have established your database connection strings correctly. Please consult the configuration file documentation to see how to establish connection strings to the directory database.

To create the structure of your directory you will need to logon to the administration pages. It's a good idea to have both the admin pages and front-end pages open in separate browser windows. Using the admin pages click "New Category" within the Directory Management section on the left. The "New Category" page will be used to add all the categories your directory will consist of.

Typical directory structures provide 1 or 2 levels of root categories before resources become available. This is a good idea to narrow interest areas of categories within the directory.

For example, you may have a top-level category called Arts & Entertainment with a number of more specific 2nd level categories covering Arts & Entertainment subjects. In this instance the "Art & Entertainment" would be marked as a root category and link submissions would not be allowed within this category. The 2nd level categories would allow links so users can submit resources to the specific categories of interest within Arts & Entertainment.

We will use this example to create our first directory. Click "New Category" within the administration and enter Arts & Entertainment within the Category Name field. This category will only host sub-categories so the Allow Links checkbox should be left unchecked. Within the Parent Category options select Root Category. This will create your first root category. Refresh the front-end browser window to see this new category appear.

The next step would be to create more specific categories within your new top-level category. We will create another category called Actors and Actresses to live within Arts & Entertainment. We would like to allow links to be submitted to this new 2nd level category.

To create your new sub category select the admin pages again and click the "New Category" link. Enter Actors and Actresses within the categories name field. This time tick the allow links checkbox and select Arts & Entertainment as a parent category. The new Actors and Actresses category will now appear within the Arts & Entertainment category. Because your new category is also allowed links, a message will appear within the category providing users with the ability to start submitting links to this category.

This process should then be continued for other root level and sub categories. Once you become familiar with creating category structures using the deloittes.NET Directory, it becomes easy to create complex directory structures within a matter of minutes.

Remember you have the ability to move categories around within the directory at any time using the Manage Directory features.


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