An interesting thing about building a local business directory is that often sites are submitted to the free My Cape Town Directory that send you off on a tangent. A recent submission was one for SAQuotes, who offer a quoting system. All you do is choose the category and area you are interested in, fill in a form and wait for people to contact you.

Now SAQuotes submitted a link to their quoting search form for blinds in Cape Town and I toddled off to the site to have a look and check for relevance to Cape Town as well as a local physical address or phone number. That the service, on the url submitted, is for Cape Town is patently obvious, so no problem and I accepted their submission.

A couple of points, though:

1. I would presume that the owners of the site would like people to submit their requests quickly and painlessly so have made the site pretty simple, BUT, for idiots like moi who like to see more detail I couldn’t see any links to a search form for town specific quotation requests.
2. Just how a business gets listed on their database is also not apparent.
3. I would imagine that by making it as attractive as possible for a business to list on their database the ‘word of mouth internet marketing effect’ would help promote the service.

Then I noticed that there are one or two other sites offering the same quotation finding service and wondered if people who had used such a service would like to drop me (alan[at]MyCapeTown) a line (or comment below) and tell me what you thought?