Platforms for a whole town.
Built and run by us.
Directories, portals and listings systems where the public, the business owners and the admin all have their own side of the site. Here's one we built for our own town and run every day.
Free Southport — a genuinely free business directory
Southport's small businesses were paying directories for leads and getting listed on national platforms that could not tell Southport from Dorset. So we built the directory the town should have had: free to be on, free to stay on, nobody pays to move up, and every listing shows whether its owner has verified it and when. Launched 23 September 2026 after a written build discipline that put research and a signed spec before a single line of HTML.
Twelve live categories in the first five days, from dog groomers to garages. Every listing carries a recorded source and date for every field, and nothing is copied from Google Maps or another directory.
- 266 listings across 12 categories, 191 indexable, 10 owner-verified in the first four days
- 1,983 sourced fields; every MOT garage checked against the DVSA register with the date
- Owner portal with passwordless sign-in, drafts and approval; admin dashboard; claim and verify flow
- First-party analytics with no cookies for visitors; admin devices excluded automatically
- Strict content security policy (no inline scripts or styles); per-listing share images; independent audit 97/100
- On Google page one for its first category inside 24 hours of going live; first unprompted business request on day four
Three sides of one site
A platform is not a website with more pages. It is three products that share one database, and each has to work on a phone.
The public side
Category pages written as answers: how to choose, what things cost locally with the figures named, sourced local facts, and listings ordered by a rule nobody can buy their way round. Schema, share images and an AI-readable index on every page.
The owner side
A business claims its listing by email code, signs in with a one-use link (no passwords), edits a draft, uploads a photo, and sends it for approval. A verified badge and a followed link back to their own site when it goes live.
The admin side
Submissions, claims, edits with a before-and-after diff, a listing editor, and a visitors dashboard. Every stored field carries who recorded it, from where, and when. Register checks (DVSA, Companies House) with re-check dates.
The rules
Nothing from Google Maps or other directories. A business is “based in Southport” only when its own page says so. No borrowed review stars. Thin listings stay out of Google until they are confirmed. Written down before the build, followed during it.
Want one for your town or your trade?
The Free Southport build was designed to be repeated: the same portal, admin, analytics and data rules for another town, or a members' platform for a trade body. Scoped and quoted per project on a call with Graham. You own it.