Case study: Linkdoozer

Linkdoozer's mission is to create a stimulating and engaging environment that allows people to discover suitable websites and webpages based on their interests. By providing exciting and diverse content, linkdoozer can help readers make genuinely good browsing decisions. Because its directory focusses on quality websites of great value and interest and not volume, readers can enjoy the process of discovery knowing that they are only exposed to high quality websites.

The aim of Linkdoozer

What Linkdoozer has done, is nothing less than address the one real achillies heel of the Internet - information overload. Instead of building up hundreds of thousands of pages of content, which invariably is not all that useful, it builds its content slowly, with human editors only, to ensure that high quality websites are added to its directory and nothing else.

The main focus is to provide a smaller web directory resource that consists of only a few of the genuinely best websites in the world.

"If you want to find a website on a particular topic you go to Google or some social bookmarking website and search for it. Inevitably you get hundreds of thousands of results, if not millions. It's up to you to comb through all that data to find the one or two that are generally useful. Linkdoozer only allows those top few websites into its listings index in the first place so you save time and effort."

The design

Linkdoozer also comes fully equipped with all the latest features allowing websites to be rated and commented on by users so that it's index is ranked democratically, giving a literal best of the best. This is also to ensure users that no bias can creep into the index because it is controlled directly by the boting public.

In addition, all the website listings, which are presented in the form of short, but insightful and professional reviews are geared for social network integration - Facebook, Digg and so on. This makes a Linkdoozer website listing prime property because the listing has the potential to go viral at any stage.

Naturally the directory is also integrated with other important social media and a single listing on Linkdoozer inevitably turns into multiple quality backlinks, from the webmaster's point of view, from sites like Twitter and technorati.

Custom enhancements

Unlike most directories that articifially categorize websites into often times confusing, deep hierarchical structures. The websites in Linkdoozer's index are presented by topic and relation giving the directory a far more intuitive and browsable structure. This also directly benefits the websites themselves because their listing appear all over the show for an indefinite amount of time, as opposed to disappearing off the front page and never being seen again.

Linkdoozer also adds complete one-click bookmarking features and offers a free bookmarks or favorites account that can be used to manage and organize not only the bookmarked websites appearing in Linkdoozer's web directory, but any website the user feels like bookmarking.

The site is also equipped with an internal browser that makes it possible to treat the bookmarks page like a desktop, turning user's bookmarks into a sophisticated, fast and efficient Web browser in it's own right.

What it cost

Linkdoozer required:

1. Grand package - includes complete deployment, configuration and setup of website and webserver at a cost of $150 plus an annual hosting fee of around $290
2. Web design (professional) - includes complete design with graphics, HTML, CSS, etc at a cost of $950
3. Custom web development - includes heavy utilization of specialized views, performance and custom scripting $4350

It goes without saying that the website has the best SEO features available in the world and that it utilizes all the industry best practices when it comes to caching and performance. The server performance is also the best of the best and the backend comes with full cPanel administrative features, amongst many other things.