Somehow having a directory at every nook and corner have reduced their importance and effectiveness. Our faith in them as an effective advertising platform has also gone down. Now we feel that for a directory to survive, it has go beyond a ready made script and be ‘out of the box’. Regular readers of our blog know we say this continuously and also know that whenever we find sites that do things differently, we showcase them. Today we looked at a directory, the HighStuffs business directory, which we feel deserves a mention.

Obviously the best way you can soak in the site is by visiting it but we will still do our best to help you note the salient points. The categorising of the directory is unique. The directory structure is a mix of categories and tags. Even though each broad category has a seperate header the sub categories are organised in tag style but alphabetically. Things are different but not just for the sake of being different. They are useful too.

The directory has been promoted honestly and currently has attained a pagerank of 5. All listings are either paid or reciprocal. All reciprocal links to Highstuff directory must be placed on PR4+ pages. This means that a high page rank for the directory is near guaranteed. Agreed that the number of listings may be fewer but again that may not be such a bad thing. (But if you take a look at the Freebies category there are more listings that some other directories)

A good Alexa ranking also suggests that this directory is doing well in terms of traffic which again means that the different methodologies are actually working. HighStuff directory is probably another proof that different but positive ways of doing things help to make things better.