Number of Categories for One Site

Hi guys!

I have a rather simple question and that is, to how many categories can a site be submitted without being treated as spam?

For example my own site topic ranges from electronic music, multimedia, audio samples, image galleries...etc There are many categories the site could be listed in.

Now do I only pick ONE and stick to it or try to cover other relevant subcategories?

We are a community / collective-based group, and there are many people doing things. Is there a way to see if a submission for a site has been sent so I don't re-submit... as I heard the site listing goes to the bottom of the queue?

Thank you!

I assume its your personal homepage? Since those tend to have a bulk of totally unrelated content, the amount not justifying lots of entries in our eyes, we have a special storage area for those: http://ch.dmoz.org/Society/People/Personal_Homepages/

About checking: We can check for a site in a category. We need both information. If you have it, head to the Submission Status foirum and read the forum guidelines before posting there. You can imagine that we don't like to check for dozends of guessed categories, so be nice with us...

In general terms, multiple listings in multiple Topical categories are the exception rather than the rule. Given that the examples you give sound like parts of a common whole (like parts of a movie or celebrity fan site, say), I'd have to say "no" in your case but if you want specific feedback, you'll really have to give us the URLs of the various sections and where you think you'd want to list them.

Regarding finding out if any have already been listed, you would post your request in the Site Submission Status forum (after first carefully reading the "READ BEFORE POSTING" thread there).

Hey thanks for your quick response!

About the site. It is definately not a personal home page. Analogik is an ongoing collective media project initiated in 1998. (The site has been up since then).

In my (biased) opinion, the site could fit in many areas as it covers the following:

Professional services:
-Multimedia and Management
-Web Design
-Audio Engineering
-Audio Samples
-Design and Print

Community:
-Forums
-Digitral Arts
-Electronic Music

Arts:
-Music
-Multimedia
-Digital Arts

Galleries / Displays:
-Image galleries
-Multimedia showcases

Miscellaneous Topics / Articles:
-Science topics (psychology, technology, astronomy, biology)

Regional Activity:
-Brisbane
-QLD
-Australia

Worldwide Projects and Collaborations:
-World
-Serbia
-Germany
-Croatia
-USA

This is the site: http://analogik.com
I hope you get a glimpse of my confusion

Thanks again!

OK, let's sanitize that list a bit.

First of all: worldwide activity and collaborations: that doesn't mean you get a listing in every place where some collaborator lives, it means location is obviously IRRELEVANT to your activity, so you shouldn't have a listing in ANY location-specific category. Scratch all the regional categories.

Then the professional activities: Intrinsic in the whole idea of "Web design" is that you presumably have some skill in creating some TYPE of content (for the web). So we'd list a Web Designer in ONE category ONLY...we have a whole slew of W-D categories, but pick exactly ONE.

Or, there is another way to go. You misunderstand the concept of "Personal Home Page." It's not a site that has nothing whatsoever to do with any other person. It's a site that has no focus other than the activities and interests (social or antisocial) of a particular person. The presence of miscellaneous original content by you and organizations with which you are associated strongly suggests that this IS a personal home page. That is the ONE BEST category that it would fit. And if you later decide to add information on Druidic Basketweaving or faux-cuneiform murals, it will still be the best category.

The Arts categories is another possibility. But the whole idea of "multimedia" is to cover sites without a focus corresponding to a particular medium. It's not to provide yet another category to list a site that's already listed under each specific medium.

I personally would NOT list a site under both Web Designers and Personal Home Pages -- I'd try to decide whether it was a site by a Web Designer trying to showcase his flexibility, or a personal site hoping to pick up some income on the side with freelance webdesign.

As for "forums", our taxonomy may not be fully consistent here, since "forum" is a kind of content rather than a subject. But some sites consist solely of forums and have no other focus, so we have that category for them. We would almost never list a forum separately, if its parent site on the same subject was listed.

Remember, the object of the exercise is not to come up with a tenuous connection to every conceivable category: it's to pick the category that most closely fits!

So, what's the ONE BEST category? Is it more about your (1) personal interests [Personal Home Pages] (2) Commercial/Professional Web Design, or (3) Commercial or non-commercial artistic endeavors [Multimedia]?

OK. I am absolutely overwhelmed by your response and am really glad I’ve joined this forum.

1. I would certainly stay away from the personal homepage category since there are many other collaborators and co-owners of this site (and they probably wouldn’t appreciate if I list it there).

2. Multimedia section sounds like the one. Except the commercial factor which we heavily combine in our web presentation. Unlike many other sites offering services we do it in a slightly different way. Web design and multimedia services (or links to them) are quietly sitting in the corner as the user enjoys the multimedia content and other entertaining and educational factors.

3. Web Design would be the one to list in if I would have to choose. But I am worried about the style of the site would is not 100% focused on commercial sphere. That could cause an editor to turn my site down for that category.

4. Maybe there is a commercial Multimedia section to consider…?

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Dynamic_and_Multimedia/ ?

Yes. That sounds like it. I've applied for some other categories in the past - and got no response... is it safe to apply here as well?

OK, I've been looking this over, and considering the number of times it's been submitted, I'd suggest you *do not* submit again.

It was listed already in two different categories, but the site really wasn't appropriate for one of those categories (Arts/Music/Styles/Dance/Drum_and_Bass/Bands_and_Artists) so I removed it from there. It fits well in the other category, so I left it there, but made some changes to title and description. You can see the current version at this URL:
http://editors.dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Styles/Electronic/

It appears that on your last submission it was diverted because the submission process was unable to determine your IP address (this happens now and then). The submission was about to be routed to the category you submitted to, but it wasn't right for that category either. It is possible it would also fit in the above named category (Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Dynamic_and_Multimedia), so I diverted the submission there. It's waiting in the unreviewed queue now for an editor to look at it.

Since you are already in one category, I can't say that you will get another listing, but you'll be considered for it. I can't say how long that will be, but you can come back in one month with your URL and the category, and ask for the status in the Submission Status forum.

http://editors.dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Styles/Electronic/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Styles/Electronic/

One displays updated state - the other one does not.

Also, one of the major features of Analogik site is freely downloadable audio files and samples as well as mp3 tracks. I was wondering if it would be possible to include those in the description too.

Yup, we know about the pages being out of sync -- that's why we offered the other link (which is currently available to the public, but will probably be made editors-only at some point). There was a hardware upgrade which has resulted in some page regeneration downtime.

If I were reviewing this site in Dynamic_and_Multimedia, I probably wouldn't list it there. I'd think that the site probably belongs somewhere in Arts/ (or possibly in Computers/Multimedia). Arts/Digital seems like a really good starting point, but there doesn't seem to be an appropriate subcat. (Maybe other editors have thoughts?)

I'd think that a listing in a Brisbane Arts_and_Entertainment cat might also be appropriate, since a cluster of programs and at least some of the people seem to be from there.

I would, however, take theseeker's advice and not submit again. Someone can move your submission if there's some consensus on a better place for the site.

If you'd like your description changed, you should submit an update request on the URL. You might want to look at the guidelines before doing so -- it might give you a better chance of having a proposed change accepted.

So what you're suggesting is that my work is done here?

Naturally being a webmaster I would like to give my site a fair go and cover as many valid categories as possible but if I am not advised to submit anymore then it's best to leave and forget it.

Currently the site is listed in once category *less* than when I came here which is kind of the opposite of what every webmaster hopes for.

Hopefully someone will find an appropriate category withing multimedia for this site. I supose it's better to be listed in a very few relevant categories than many that are not tightly related to the site's topic.

If you'd like to offer further thoughts on where your site should be placed, please do so, keeping in mind that we really want to come up with one topical category and [/b]possibly one regional category[/b].

I can see that losing a listing would be disappointing to you as a webmaster, but if you think of it as improving the directory by getting your site correctly placed, isn't it a good thing?

As you seem to have realized, the directory categories are more like "buckets" for sites than they are "checkboxes" for sites. Other than across the regional/topical (and world/top) lines, it's rare that it would be appropriate to list a site in more than one category. It's a pretty important component of our guidelines, and probably makes more sense if you remember that we're trying to present useful content to the user (through listed sites, descriptions, and links to related categories), and not (directly) to drive traffic to websites.

A similar, but not identical example is that we might list an online forum that covers literature, music, and papermaking in http://dmoz.org/Arts/Chats_and_Forums/, while forums that covered those individually might go in http://dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Chats_and_Forums/ , http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Chats_and_Forums/ , and http://dmoz.org/Arts/Crafts/Papermaking/ . We wouldn't give the papermaking one an extra listing just so it also showed up under Chats_and_Forums.

Hope this helps.

I have just realised I DO have a regional listing and is - ABSOLUTELY innacurate... what do I do now?

Listing:
http://dmoz.org/Regional/Oceania/Australia/Queensland/Localities/W/Woolloongabba/Arts_and_Entertainment/

I have no idea how I got listed there since we're not locality based.

It should be: http://dmoz.org/Regional/Oceania/Australia/

as we are Australian based collective.

When we're listing something in Regional, we always place it as precisely as we can. With few exceptions, we go by location and not by service area, so a site in Brisbane that served all of Queensland would still go in a Brisbane category.

Your site has over a hundred references to Brisbane, some of them in title tags, so Brisbane is where I'd have put it. But an editor much more familiar with that area than I am found a Brisbane address on the site and recognized what part of Brisbane it was in.

So there you are: Woolloongabba.

hehe... no actually Wooloongabba is where I live.
I don't think it was the editor who has listed the site there. Might have been one of my colleagues.

So it's the location - not the area of operation - then Brisbane sounds like a category to go in.

Frankly, I'm not convinced that this site should even have a Regional listing. There is no address on the site, and it isn't really a brick and mortar type of operation. What benefit is there to a Regional surfer? I think that Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Designers/Dynamic_and_Multimedia is the place to go. That seems to me the ONE best category for this site.

Honestly though, if it takes this many people to figure out what the purpose of the site is, then maybe you might want to look into clarifying your mission a bit. It's still really not clear to me what it is you offer here. If you're a web design company that offers multimedia expertise, then there seems to be a lot of extraneous clutter. Sorry to be so brutal but it does appear rather confusing to me. When I see a headline in the middle of a page that says "Mars photos from my balcony" the first thing I think of is "This is a personal web site!" "My" is usually the trigger word there

Anyway, I digress. This is not the place for a discussion of your business plan and interactive architecture. I think that we've probably found the one best category for this and the question has been answered

I understand everything you are saying. This is not the first time people get confused about the mission of our project. And this is probably something Dmoz or any other structured directory type isn't able to digest.

And you are right. We have our own style and a strategy, hoping we'll be something orange in a big pulp of grey Internet sales hype.

Many thanks to everyone who has posted here so far. It has been a great learning experience for some of us here!