Qosh: Free Business Directory

Update 26 Feb 2008 :: We are managing Qosh ourselves. It's up, running and bug-free. We're concentrating on building the customer base and perfecting the system...

Update 15 Nov 2007 :: Our partners in the running of Qosh haven't been able to provide the involvement required to make it successful... We're hoping to find new partners, or possibly sell the concept and software...

Qosh is Top-Cat's flagship Web 2.0 online application...

Qosh has just been released (28 March 2007). It has been a relatively long development - the original idea was proposed back in November 2005, but it's now 3 months ahead of the schedule I'd been working to...

We're operating a three-phase launch process. Version 1 is the first phase, the second will include paid advertising - in addition to the free listings...

A Free Directory of: People, Businesses, Products and Stock and Jobs

Qosh is designed to be a commercial networking hub - a bit like a business version of MySpace, but with a better interface and functionality. To that end, customers can manage a wide range of business data - not just the basic business listing...

The local search / search by postcode allows visitors to find what they want, where they want it. It allows people to find jobs they can commute to...

The Philosophy Behind Qosh

Free Listings - Forever

As a person resposnsible for the online marketing for a number of websites, I get very frustrated with the poor quality of the existing online directories. Furthermore, they like to charge fees of hundreds of pounds for a link to your website - and it's often on a low ranking page (i.e. PR3 or less)...

The life and soul of a directory is it's data. Quality and quantity of data is paramount, so it seems somewhat self-defeating to charge to list... Besides, there are other ways that Qosh can create an income. More on that later...

Performance: Fast Response

Qosh was designed with performance as the first priority. The initial development was in PHP because it's quick and easy to use, and was thought to be a good way to provide a 'proof of concept'. I was considering ultimately re-writing the whole system in C/C++ - but the performance of the PHP system has been so good, that this probably won't be necessary...

Page serve times are reported at the bottom of all pages, and, excluding the search pages (which are dependant on the specific query, and the database performance), they are between 0.014 and 0.05 seconds (On my £800 desktop). Which I'm very happy with...

Another major factor affecting the website's responsiveness - is the size of the individual pages. To this end, all generated HTML is optimised to be as small as possible. HTML 4.01 is used - not XHTML, because it requires fewer characters (this may seem a bit anal - but I grew up programming computers that have less memory than my toothbrush now has). The result is that the page framework only occupies about 8Kb - including images!

Minimalist / Uncluttered Design

Qosh aims to include only the information you need on the page, but equally if you need it - it should be there...

Extensive use is made of hidden tables - for the 'My Menu', 'Search Criteria' and many other places.

Technical Points...

No objects, no AJAX... The only 3rd-party code is the WYSIWYG editor...

More later...