Navigating StateGuide Like A Pro

StateGuide.com is designed to allow those familiar with its structure to skip the ''surfing'' and go straight their target. The URL structure is rigid and very simple, just add the / 2-character STATE CODE to go to that state's index page for a listing of the towns covered, or add the / STATE CODE and the / TOWN NAME to bypass everything and go to a specific community page. Use all lowercase, do not abbreviate any part of the town name, and do not space between multi-word names. That's it!

Example 1: Elizabeth City, North Carolina

http://stateguide.com/nc/elizabethcity
Example 2: Denver, CO

http://stateguide.com/co/denver

Oooooo, so you're a deep-reader, eh? Well, StateGuide is not the typical ''brochure'' travel site chock-full of warm & fuzzy pictures of mountain meadows ablaze in wildflowers and/or those same two little kids making a sand castle on the beach. Nor is it yet another of those cheesy ''local'' concoctions conjured up by the portals. It is best described as a cheesy travel & relocation ''utility,'' or ''edited bookmarks on steroids.'' Of course, the fact that we conjured it up makes it infinitely more interesting. (It really did start out as a set of bookmarks on one of our desktops.)

At any rate, we developed it, and then we found that we were actually referencing it more and more for our own personal use. [Click here for a typical scenario.] Somewhere along the line, we also figured that about 80 percent of the travel geeks out there knew where they were going, and probably even where they were planning to stay when they got there. So, without first ramping up for an IPO, or even giving it the benefit of a modest web-venture kick-off in the form of a series of Super Bowl ads, we just tossed this project out on the web to fend for itself.... the logic being that if it was useful, the savvy ones would find it. It seems to be working.

Oh, one more thing..... being on the web 8-14 hours per day ourselves, we don't particularly like having to drill down through eight layers of HTML pages to find the good stuff. We expect that you feel much the same way. So take a minute, quit skimming, RE-read the first part of this page, get a grip on the way StateGuide is structured, and then skip the surfing. You might be cutting us out of 2/1000th ¢ of banner revenue every time you skip a page, but we'll survive. We'll just have to hold off a day or two longer on that prime-time TV ad blitz we are planning.

While we're on the subject of ads, WE HATE POP-UPS and POP-UNDERS!!! We don't use them. So, if you see them on a StateGuide page, we aren't to blame. The search engine Google® gives a good explanation of what's going on, right here.

Q & A:

There are tens of thousands of links, do they all work?

A #1:

No.

A #2:

StateGuide isn't your usual link directory, read on for an understanding of HOW it works for the better answer.

Rather than hardcoding the links to other sites, StateGuide develops and maintains a database of ''keys'' that can be used to open other web pages. If we find a site which fills an information need for our users in the MAJORITY of communities, then we will add the link and matching keys. When we add the new link, our site-building software automatically replicates it across all 4,000 pages. On occasion, this produces some misnomers such as state instead of commonwealth or county rather than parish, as well as broken links, ''404 Not Found'' error messages, and the like. There are even some almost comically illogical links --National Forests in Rhode Island, or Amtrak station in Hawaii, for example.

Why isn't ''Such-and-Such'' (a specific town) listed?

Hey! We're working on it. But in its first phase StateGuide only listed towns with accommodations that may be booked online. We chose the broadest database resource we could find at the time, but there are certainly some communities that did not make this list.

Where is the state information?

StateGuide was built on the premise that its users would be targeting specific towns or communities. Each and every town web page has all the state information included so that it becomes a handy, single reference point.