A county business directory nobody had built

If you wanted to find a plumber in Palatka, or an outfitter on the river, or simply see what businesses existed in Putnam County, there was nowhere to look. The chamber list was partial and out of date. The big national directories carried a thin, wrong subset scraped years earlier and never corrected. Search results were dominated by aggregators that had never been within a hundred miles of the place.

This is the ordinary condition of small counties. The data exists, in state registrations and public records, but nobody assembles it because assembling it is unglamorous and the market looks too small to justify a team.

The work was mostly data, not design. Pull the records, clean them, resolve the duplicates, geocode the addresses, categorize the businesses, and only then decide what a page should look like. Getting the dataset right was the project. The site is what the dataset made possible.

Every business gets its own page, every category gets an index, and the whole set is generated at build time as static HTML. There is no database call when a visitor arrives, which is why it stays fast and costs almost nothing to run.