Thread: Need Setup Advice

Need Setup Advice

I've been playing around with things and have a basic grasp of the capabilities of the theme so far, but I'm stuck on trying to find the best layout for what I need.

I'm trying to setup this theme for a karaoke directory website http://www.karaokeseeker.com/. It's basically going to be a nationwide (US) listing of karaoke bars, karaoke equipment, and karaoke DJs.

Here's where I'm getting stuck:


1) At first it was just going to be karaoke bars and was just going to make all 50 states categories and all the major cities as subcategories. But then I decided that in the future I'll probably want to include listings for karaoke equipment, and also karaoke DJs for weddings/parties. What would be a good way to structure this?


Also, when people do a search, can these categories be separated & labelled in the search results so that people know which is which? Most people will just be searching for the bars, and will most likely get sidetracked & annoyed by equipment & DJ listings. If this can't be done, would using subdomains for each be a good way to go?


2) Here's what I want the click-flow to be for somebody visiting the homepage:

• Choose your state from map (takes the user to the state category)
• Choose your city (display major city subcategories without listings showing up yet)
• Show listings with list of additional smaller city subcategories on top to narrow it down even more.

On the state page, how do I show a list of city subcategories and keep the listings from showing up until they get to the city?


3) Is it possible to show a mashup of all listing results on a map? For example, when somebody lands on the Austin page which has 10 results, I'd like to show all 10 results on a single map, each with title labels. Is this a capability in vantage or do I need to dig into some custom google map api code?


4) On the create listing form, rather than having all categories and subcategories in the one drop down list, it would be nice to just have a list of parent categories at first, then after it's chosen show another list of subcategories, and keep showing more until there are no more subcategories available.


This will make things much cleaner, especially in my case where I'll have a huge list of states & cities.


5) On top of that, is it possible for the user to create a new category (city) if theirs does not already exist?




So, these are the main issues I'm anticipating so far in my planning stages. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!